Affiliate marketing online is a type of marketing in which one person (the affiliate) promotes the product of another or a company online and gets paid a percentage of the sales.

It works by linking a publisher to an advertiser. Say for example you are passionate about hiking backpacks and have plenty of experience on this topic, you could promote the product of an advertiser you believe makes great hiking backpacks. When you do this, you become an affiliate of that advertiser. You are in turn known as a publisher because you publish information that draw people to by the advertiser’s products.

If this advertiser has an affiliate program (many companies do), they will pay you the publisher a percentage(commission) of the sale of that product if someone goes through your site and buys the product.

How does affiliate marketing online work?

Many companies like Amazon, Walmart, Baby r us and EBay have affiliate programs. These companies work with publishers to help advertise their products. These publishers are called affiliates thus the term affiliate marketing.

To become an affiliate, you need to enroll in the affiliate program of these companies. Registration is usually free and very easy to do. Most programs require that you have a website before you can join their program. However, more and more programs are making it possible to join without a website.

After applying to an affiliate program, there is a wait period when these companies determine your qualification. If your application is approved, you are assigned a unique affiliate number or code.

This code is what you will post on your website when you write product reviews. This code is unique to you so when people land on the programs page after clicking on a link containing your code, you get credit for this action depending on the payment type of affiliate program.

Affiliate programs can use CPM (cost-per-mille), CPC (cost-per-click) or CPA (cost-per-action) payment methods. In CPM, you get paid a certain amount every time 1000 people tack and action (it could be clicks, referrals or any number of actions). CPC means exactly what its names says. You get paid every time someone click on a desired link or ad. CPA is very similar to CPC.

Some affiliate programs pay recurrent commissions. These programs are usually membership programs where members are charged monthly fees. These kinds of affiliate programs are a huge source of passive income for most experienced affiliate marketers.

You can put product links from these sites on your website. Whenever someone visits your site, they might like the product and click on that link which will take them to the site of the retailer or advertiser.

If this visitor buys from that site, you get paid a percentage of the sales once for consumer items or monthly/yearly for membership programs.

Benefits of affiliate marketing to the affiliate

You do not have to have a product in order to get into business. In affiliate marketing, you make money by writing product reviews which inform people about a product.

Since you don’t have a product, you do not have to worry about things like product development/manufacture, packaging, transportation, distribution, damages and sales. It is a lot easier for you than it is for the manufacturer.

You do not have to have a huge start up budget as is required for starting some businesses. With affiliate marketing, most if not all of your work is done on the internet.

You can work from any place in the world; this implies that someone residing in India can be an affiliate of a business based in the U.S. or anywhere in the world.

Benefits of affiliate marketing for the merchant

Affiliate programs are almost risk free for merchants as they only pay when a client takes a desired action on the merchant’s site. Some merchants only pay if a client buys an item while others pay for clicks plus purchases.

Affiliate marketing is an agreement between the merchant and the affiliate. The affiliate agrees to help the merchant promote their product on their website, social media pages or any method they choose, in exchange commission. If the affiliate is really good at what they do, they make money while the merchant makes sales. It is a win win.

Affiliate programs give merchants a bigger market to advertise their product or service to. It gives the product or service plenty of exposure in ways that it may not have gotten with other traditional advertising techniques. Affiliate marketing programs allow merchants to develop a network of individuals working to promote their product. This network grows and becomes larger and more powerful each day as new affiliates joint.

Seeing how google loves websites with good strong links, affiliate marketing can help a merchant’s website rank better on google. As more and more websites link to the merchants website, so will their exposure grow and thus their sales.

A merchant can learn a lot from the data they collect from their affiliates. This can help them fine tune their advertising campaigns which can lead to increase in sales.

Disadvantages of affiliate marketing

For beginners, affiliate income may not be sustainable since pay is usually sporadic. There is also the problem of link hijackers who hack into sites and are paid instead of the affiliates.

How to find an affiliate program for my niche

A niche is a narrow segment of the market for a specific products. A niche is different from a field which is broader. A field could be say baby products and a niche will be a subsection in that field and could be something like sport strollers.

Let’s say your niche is about sport strollers, then to find affiliate programs for that niche you simply go to google and type “sport strollers + affiliate programs”. This will pull up a list of possible affiliate programs for your niche which you can choose from.

# 1 affiliate program

There are many great affiliate programs out there, all you have to do is look. Among these programs, Wealthy affiliate (WA) provides one of the most generous commissions for both its starter members and premium members.

With Wealthy affiliate, you do not only benefit from the generous affiliate program, you also get a rich package composed of step by step lessons in audio, video and written form, domain purchase tool, website building platform, site monitoring and top level security.

With good security, you do not have to worry about link hijackers (you can focus on growing your business).

You can enroll for free and be qualified for most of these tools/platforms. There is no rush and no up sells (what you see is what you get).

The free membership has no expiring date; this means you are given enough time to get to know the program and decide for yourself if you want to upgrade or not.

What you get by being a member of WA is a great community, plenty of step by step tutoring on how to set up a successful business online and access to the most lucrative affiliate program online. The table is a summary of what wealthy affiliate offers and below the commissions offered by wealthy affiliate.

STARTER Member Commissions:

Initial $19 offer, Commission = $4
$47/month, Commission = $11.25 recurring
$359/year, Commission = $87.50 recurring

Premium Member Commissions:

Credits: They Set-up their account = $1
Initial $19 offer, Commission = $8
$47/month, Commission = $22.50 recurring
$359/year, Commission = $175 recurring!

Make the move towards financial independence today with Wealthy affiliate.

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Cheers Denise.