Affiliate Marketing 101: A Deep Dive for Beginners
Affiliate marketing is becoming a popular marketing strategy used by companies and brands in various industries. From a business point of view, affiliate marketing is considered as a cost-effective strategy for enhancing brand awareness, generating leads, and increasing sales.
Google Trends shows that, starting in February 2021, interest about affiliate marketing has increased in Indonesia over the previous two years.
Wecantrack.com reported that the affiliate marketing industry grew by 10.1% between 2022 and 2023, with an estimated value of $14.2 billion by the end of this year. Furthermore, it's projected to keep growing as more companies and brands come to recognize the benefits of this strategy.
Don't miss out on this great opportunity to earn additional income through affiliate programs provided by businesses or brands. Here are the key concepts and fundamental rules you need to understand if you want to become an affiliate marketer.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a model of marketing strategy where businesses compensate bloggers, influencers, YouTubers, and other third parties (also known as affiliates) to promote their products or services. Usually, certain brands or businesses decide to use this strategy to reach some sort of goals, such as:
- Brand awareness
- Increasing website traffic
- Boosting sales
- Increasing market share
As an affiliate, you can earn commissions or rewards based on certain metrics, such as leads generated, clicks on advertisements or websites, downloads of mobile apps, and others. For affiliate marketing, you can use a wide range of platforms, such as websites, blogs, and social media.
How Affiliate Marketing Works?
Some of the primary roles in affiliate marketing that has a unique function:
- Publisher or affiliate: brand or company which uses affiliate marketing to promote products and services.
- Merchant: The person, organization, or brand that is in charge of the products and services that affiliates promote.
- Affiliate network: the intermediary who assists in providing affiliate programs and connecting affiliates and merchants.
- Customer: The person who uses a link or code provided by an affiliate to buy products or services.
Through affiliate marketing networks, you can connect with merchants as an affiliate. Once an agreement has been reached, you can start publishing diverse content to promote the products or services and attract customers.
Affiliate Marketing Types
There are three main types of affiliate marketing, according to Pat Flynn:
1. Unattached Affiliate Marketing
You as an affiliate don't directly interact with customers or the target market for the promoted products or services. You can simply put affiliate links into Google Adwords, Meta Ads, and any other platforms in the expectation that customers are going to click on the links, make purchases, and enable you to earn commission.
2. Related Affiliate Marketing
Through this type, you can create online content for blogs or social media that is relevant to the specific products or services. You may not use the products or services you are promoting, regardless of having expertise in a certain niche. Due to the fact that you haven't used the affiliated products or services, there is a chance that the product or service has a low quality, which is a disadvantage of this type.
3. Involved Affiliate Marketing
By choosing this type, you only promote products and services that you have personally used. Your personal experience can build audience trust and increase the potential of them using the recommended products or services. Because audience trust is now one of the main factors influencing their decision to buy a product or utilize a service, the first two methods of affiliate marketing are rarely used. The involved form of affiliate marketing was created for this reason. In this type, you as an affiliate promote a product or service based on your own personal experience. Because of this, your audience will have more faith and motivation to use the product or service that you are promoting.
Affiliate Marketing Payment Models
You might have questions about the payment options if you're thinking about joining an affiliate program. There are four typical ways for affiliates to be compensated in affiliate marketing:
1. Pay per Sale
This type of model is popular in e-commerce. You will get a commission when customers use your affiliate link to make purchases. Commissions are determined as a certain percentage of the selling price of the products.
2. Pay per Click
With this method, you are paid based on how many people visit the website or business you're promoting after clicking on your affiliate links. Whether or not visitors make purchases, payments are based on the quantity of clicks.
3. Pay per Action
With this payment model, you can get commissions based on specific actions that prospective customers do. The method, which may be used for a variety of products such as form submissions, newsletter sign-ups, and app downloads, is widely used by affiliate marketing networks.
4. Pay per Lead
With this system, you get paid when someone uses your affiliate link to do a specific action. The common applications of this method are generating leads, organizing giveaways and others. Because getting leads is frequently simpler than selling things, so it is ideal for beginners.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
1. Minimal Cost
One of the main benefits of affiliate marketing is the minimal cost needed. All you need are a smartphone, access to the internet, and good interpersonal skills.
2. Flexibility of Working Hours
There are no time limitations for working in affiliate marketing. You are free to choose your work schedule based on how busy your schedule is.
3. Unlimited Work Locations
Additionally, affiliate marketing encourages workplace flexibility. As long as you have access to the internet, you are able to do it wherever you go. You are allowed to work anywhere you want, including at home, coffee shop, campus, etc.
4. Ability to Join More Than One Programs
Affiliate marketing allows you to actively join several affiliate programs. To prevent such issues in the future, it is important to read and fully understand the terms and conditions of each program.
Key Differences Between Referral and Affiliate Marketing
While talking about affiliate marketing, we are also familiar with another similar strategy, called referral marketing. Basically, the goal of both of these strategies is to persuade a customer to use or purchase a product, but you should understand some important differences between them. Here are the lists:
1. Types of Participants in the Program
- Referral marketing: customers who used a product and enjoyed its quality.
- Affiliate marketing: anyone interested in promoting a business without becoming a customer first.
2. Target Market
- Referral marketing: the potential customer and the affiliates are usually closer, such as friends or family.
- Affiliate marketing: sffiliate marketers and potential customers don't have a close relationship. They usually have a certain amount of trust, such as their followers or customers.
3. Promotional Strategy
- Referral marketing: involves personalized advertisements via emails, WhatsApp messages, or personal interactions.
- Affiliate marketing: use open platforms including websites, blogs, or social media.
4. Types of Revenue
- Referral marketing: rewards could be received in the form of discounts, store credits, coupons, cashback, or gift cards.
- Affiliate marketing: commissions are mostly paid out in cash of thr fixed amount or a percentage of each sale that is made.
5. Client Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Referral marketing: because referral programs are built on the confidence and loyalty of current consumers, it has an ability to boost CLV value.
- Affiliate marketing: affiliate programs more focus on acquiring new customers, which may have a lower CLV value.
As a result, the differences between these strategies are fairly simple to recognize. Referral marketing occasionally relies on customers who are already loyal to a product and expected to inform their close friends, family, and connections of all the benefits of the product. Whereas, affiliate marketing commonly relies on people who can persuasively communicate the benefits of a product to others to persuade them to use it.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing in 3 Simple Steps
1. Select the Platform and Research Your Audience
Each affiliate uses a different strategy and method to communicate with their audience. Discover which platforms you use the most and you're best at using. You can choose from a variety of platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and blogs. After picking the platform, identify who you want to reach and what products are required to fulfill their needs or deal with their problems. In order to grab your audience's interest, you need to identify what types of content they like, such as podcasts, articles, and videos.
2. Determine Niche and Products
The next step is to choose the niche or category of product or service that you would like to promote after identifying the products that the target audience needs. You should choose a niche that you are interested in and capable of because affiliate marketing is becoming more competitive nowadays. This will make you seem persuasive and increase your credibility among potential customers. In addition, you can learn more about the products or services offered to influence potential customers' choices.
7 best niches for affiliate marketing, according to Cheq.ai, are finance, SaaS and technology, education and learning, health and wellness, parenting and children, travel and adventure, and beauty and fashion.
3. Join a Reliable Affiliate Marketing Program
You should join a reliable affiliate marketing program, and one of them is the Topremit affiliate program which focuses on finance. Let's start by following these simple steps:
- You need a Topremit account to be able to sign up for this affiliate program. If you are interested in signing up as an affiliate on your own behalf, please visit this website: https://topremit.com/en/become-affiliate. If you want to sign up as an affiliate for a business or organization that you own, you can join by visiting: https://topremit.com/business/en/become-affiliate.
- Fill out the required fields to complete the registration process.
- After completing the registration, you can immediately become an active Topremit affiliate without having to wait for an email confirmation or account validation.
- Through the affiliate link and code available in your account, share information and encourage your friends who need Topremit’s services.
- If you want to reach more people, use all of your social networks to promote Topremit and invite them to sign up using your affiliate link or code.
- Every time a user you invited uses Topremit successfully, you will receive a commission!
Visit https://blog.topremit.com/topremit-affiliate-program/ to learn more about the terms, conditions, and rewards that could be received as well as some important guidelines that you should be understanding of. Join Topremit’s affiliate program now, and don't forget to tell your nearest and dearest about our global money-transfer services!
