Affiliate Marketing: What You Should Know

“Affiliate marketing has made businesses millions and ordinary people millionaires.” – Bo Bennett

Most of you know what affiliate marketing is. It’s the practice of finding new buyers for an existing product or service, created by someone else. You get paid a commission for promoting and selling other’s wares.

If you’re capable of making 100 sales per month by yourself, you can sell a 1000 or more by having affiliates promote on your behalf.

Let’s see how affiliate marketing works, if you’re the product owner:

Your product is priced at $30 and you sell 100 products each month, which translates to $3000/month in sales.

Now if you have 20 affiliates promoting your products, with each making a minimum of 20 sales per month, you would earn $600 from each affiliate, for a grand total of $12,000.

But who’s going to do the promotion for free? You’re obviously going to pay them a good commission. Let’s say, going by the current trend, you give a commission of 60%, which is $360 of $600, and you get to keep the remaining $240 from each affiliate/month.

Do the calculation: $240 * 20 (affiliates) = $4,800. Add this to the $3000 you’re already making.

This is a very conservative estimate as there are affiliates who make thousands of sales each month. If the product is good, there’s no limit to the affiliates that would be interested. Some marketers have thousands of affiliates promoting their products.

Let’s get back to what we’re discussing. Here we’re talking about you promoting someone else’s products as an affiliate.

Affiliate Marketing: As The Affiliate

When you’re an affiliate promoting others products, the major responsibility of selling lies with the vendor. It’s them that creates the product as well as the sales pages. You’re just sending a lead their way and if that lead converts (buys the product); you receive a commission as agreed upon.

Of course, it helps to do a little pre-selling yourself. You can’t just tell your visitors, “Please click on this and see what they’re offering.” It doesn’t work that way.

Good affiliate marketing that results in actual sales and earns you commissions includes talking about the product and explaining the details to your readers, even before they visit the vendor’s site to read and make their decision.

You have to influence their decision first. A good and genuine product review on promotional material on your site will work better for affiliate marketing.

Here’s a great diagram by Sugarrae showing the affiliate process in more detail:

Keep the following points in mind before venturing into affiliate marketing.

Promote superior quality products

Many people will tell you to promote a product that’s doing well in your niche. I’ve never believed in blindly promoting a product. Following that advice will only lead to bad relationships with your audience, unless of course the product turns out to be excellent. But why depend on luck?

I’m just being practical. How can you write a good and authentic review that makes people buy from you without knowing anything about the product?

While I don’t go the extent of asking people to waste thousands of dollars buying products before promoting them, I definitely ask affiliates to read everything there is from user reviews and other genuine material, and to find out all they can first.

Alternately, if you’re serious about promoting the product, you can even write to the vendor asking for a sample before you promote – whether it’s an eBook or something else.

My suggestion is to only promote products of superior quality.

Find out if your audience wants the product.

This may seem like a common sense thing that everybody knows, but let me tell you that very few marketers follow this.

You may think that the product you’re promoting is something that will help your audience and beneficial to them, but do they WANT it? They’re not going to think like you. They’ll only go by what they want.

This is where popularity comes into the picture. When a product is very popular, you know there must be a desire for it, and that’s why it’s popular.

Once you’re sure of the popularity of a product, you create appropriate content to make your audience turn into buyers, using your affiliate link.

Give your readers a sneak-peak into the product.

This doesn’t involve letting them see what’s inside, it involves explaining the product to them, giving them an understanding of what the product is all about. This can be done really well by providing review type of articles.

In the affiliate marketing world, it’s a well-known fact that reviews do well as promotion for products. When writing reviews, point out positive and negative aspects – if any. Be honest and this works wonders in building your reputation.

You may think people won’t buy from you once you talk about the negatives of the product, but on the contrary, you’ll be considered genuine and people will buy because you gain credibility.

They know what they’re getting into, with the products you promote. You’ll be building a long-term relationship with your audience and they’ll begin valuing your reviews highly.

But keep in mind that promoting a very bad product and telling people that it’s the worst product on earth will have an adverse affect. I’m sure nobody does that, but I had to point that out. Be smart.

Be open about your connection with the product

Being open and letting the world know that you’re an affiliate of a product is the best route to take in the current scenario.

There are two reasons for this:

1. It’s ethical and helps your relationship-building efforts.

2. This sort of disclosure is made mandatory by the FTC, not following which can land you in serious trouble with them.

So please do let your audience know that you’re an affiliate to the product you’re promoting. You don’t have to have it in large letters that fill the page, but make sure it’s written somewhere on the page.

Affiliate Marketing: A Conclusion

While being an affiliate is a wonderful way of earning big money, you’re at an advantage when you follow these simple but crucial rules of the game.

Choose a great product and dive into it with the intention of helping your audience. Concentrate on writing good content and honest reviews. Your recommendations to your readers are the ads you’re using to get them to buy. If they like what they see on your website or blog, they’ll click on the affiliate link that leads them to the sales page of the product.

Focus on your readers, and you’ll be amazed at the results you see with the right attitude.

Have you ever written honest reviews for the affiliate products you’re promoting? If yes, have you seen a difference in sales with your affiliate marketing?