Catalog:
- Basic concepts of affiliate marketing
- Advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing
- How does affiliate marketing make money
- How do I become an affiliate
- How to choose products
- How do I join the Affiliate program
When I first came across the term "Affiliate Marketing," like many people, I was a little confused. Because the term "affiliate marketing" sounds too technical to understand.
But I say: recommend products can make money! Bring the goods! Well, I'm sure you understand.
What is affiliate marketing? For merchants, alliance marketing is a marketing method; For affiliate affiliates, affiliate marketing is a way to make money by recommending products.
Affiliate marketing has other synonyms, such as affiliate marketing, affiliate programs.
As far as I know, there are many strong affiliate customers on the foreign network, relying only on affiliate marketing, monthly income of 5W-20W.
Today I'm going to talk about what affiliate marketing is and how affiliate affiliates can make money through it.
The basic concept of affiliate marketing
"Affiliate marketing, its essence is that affiliate marketers provide product promotion services for merchants, and once the marketing effect is generated, the merchants will pay affiliate marketers a commission as a reward.
"Simply put: affiliate marketers help merchants promote products, and take money if they have an effect.
If you are a cross-border independent seller, you can also do affiliate marketing and let people promote it for you.
Here are four dimensions to help you better understand what affiliate marketing is.
First: An example
In the case of buying a house: Aunt as long as she takes us to the designated sales office to see the house, she will make money.
In the eating case, the driver takes us to a designated restaurant to eat, and he makes money.
Secondly, the operation process of alliance marketing mainly consists of three steps:
- Recommend a product to others
- Someone bought a product because of your recommendation
- The merchant sends you money
Third: What are the roles in affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing involves three roles:
- Business: A company or person that sells products or services, such as a restaurant in the case of eating, is a business.
- Affiliate marketers (Affiliate customers) : People who recommend products or services to others, such as the driver in the dining case, are affiliate customers.
- Customer: The person who buys the product or service, such as me and my wife in the meal case, is the customer.
Fourth: How to determine the effect of alliance marketing?
Money, is the business to pay, the effect, is also the business to decide.
What is "effective"? Name a few common situations:
Some merchants, such as e-commerce sellers, calculate according to sales orders;
Some businesses, such as the sales office mentioned above, are calculated according to the number of people with the aunt to see the house;
Some businesses, such as dating sites, are calculated according to the number of successfully registered accounts.
Advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing
Everything has good and bad, let's talk about the advantages of affiliate marketing:
- Earn passive income: Once you've published great content that recommends products, you can move on to other things. In the future, whenever someone purchases the product through your link, you will automatically receive a commission.
- Worry: you do not have to research and development, do not have to open a store, do not have to stock up, do not have to deliver, do not have to do customer service work, these to invest a lot of manpower and material resources but also time-consuming hard work, thrown to the business to do.
- Freedom and flexibility: products sell well, you recommend more, earn more; If it doesn't sell, you move on and recommend something else. Because they do not stockpile goods, there is no cost pressure, and the ship is small and easy to turn around.
- High commission: Some affiliate projects can provide very high commission, and the products of such projects are often virtual products with low cost and no shipping.
- Tripartite win-win: merchants are very happy, because more orders; Alliance customers are happy because they make money when they recommend products; The customers were happy because they got what they needed.
- Low barriers to entry: Many affiliate programs are easy to join, and the joining process costs zero.
- Low risk: Regardless of the time and small amount of money invested, the investment of affiliate marketing is almost zero. If affiliate marketing is not for you, you have nothing to lose.
- Many options: Affiliate marketing pays according to the effect, because the effect is good, so there are too many alliance projects. When you browse the web and brush wechat, you may click into the alliance project of the business, but you do not know this.
Let's talk about the disadvantages of affiliate marketing:
- Gaining trust takes time: It's easy to apply and join affiliate programs, but if you don't trust your fans and prospects, no one clicks on your links, and you don't get paid. It takes a lot of time and effort to gain someone's trust.
- Need to output high quality content: Do affiliate marketing, you need to output high quality content, get traffic. Users see your content and approve your recommended products, and you have a chance to make money.
- You have no control over the product experience: If the customer thinks that the product you recommend is bad, it will have a negative impact on you.
- The customer is not yours: The customer information is valuable, the merchant can maintain the customer relationship and earn the customer's money later, but the money behind it has nothing to do with you.
Many people may not understand: what is the money in the back?
Let me give a typical example: 4S shop selling cars.
As we all know, most 4S stores now sell cars with very thin profits, but how does it make money?
When the naked car is sold to you, the 4S shop in addition to asking you to raise the price of the car, forcing you to buy additional equipment, also requires you to continue to buy insurance in its home for several years, because it will also earn your maintenance and repair money in the future. You know, maintenance and repair, 4S shop is the biggest source of profit.
If the 4S shop does not have you as a customer to buy a car, it cannot earn a series of money behind you.
How does affiliate marketing make money?
How to get money is always the most concerned problem.
Different alliance projects, the posture of the money is not the same, I talk about the common money standards:
- Commission: This is the most common, either in a fixed amount or as a percentage of the order.
- Action payment: It is calculated based on specific actions, such as signing up for a dating website account, such as trying a product, such as downloading an APP, etc.
- Bonus: Some merchants give out additional rewards in promotions aimed at affiliate marketers.
Common problems:
1. How much money can affiliate marketing make?
Theoretically there is no limit, from 0 to xx million per month is possible. The amount depends on your affiliate program, referral method, influence and customer trust in you.
2. after the money, how to collect?
It depends on what collection tools are supported by the affiliate merchants you join. Generally speaking, the common collection tools are these:
- PayPal: The international popular electronic wallet, similar to the domestic Alipay.
How do I register for PayPal? See how to register a PayPal business account here!
- Payoneer: A common cross-border collection tool that offers virtual bank accounts in currencies such as US dollars and euros.
How do I register for Payoneer? Check out this Payoneer registration tutorial!
- Alipay and wechat: Alliance projects for the domestic market will support Alipay and wechat payment.
- Bank account: Provide the bank account information of the specified currency
3. How long can I make the payment?
Generally speaking, the payment is made once a month, but it depends on the merchant's regulations. Because orders are subject to refund risk, many merchants have a waiting period (usually 30 days), after which the commission can be transferred into the payment process.
4. how to track my recommended products?
Business background will provide you with exclusive tracking links, customers through your tracking links to buy products, the corresponding reward is yours.
How do I become an affiliate?
To become an affiliate, you need to apply for affiliate programs. Here, let me say a few points to pay attention to:
- Low barrier to entry: The good news is that the barrier to entry to the affiliate program is very low. It has no age, gender, education, certificate requirements, and does not require you to pay any deposit.
- Ask for a personal link: In addition to filling in your personal name, email, mobile phone number, address information during the application process, many alliance programs require you to provide a personal link.
This link can be the URL of your personal website (i.e. blog), or it can be the personal homepage of social media such as Instagram, TikTok, or it can be the personal homepage of third-party blogging platforms such as Zhihu, CSDN, blogspot, etc.
Note: Some affiliate programs do not require you to provide a personal link.
- Preparatory work
Before you start affiliate marketing, you need to do a few things:
1. Determine the communication platform
In the process of applying for many affiliate programs, you will provide a personal link, which is a communication platform between you and users.
This could be your personal website, a third-party blogging platform, or a social media page. I strongly recommend: do affiliate marketing, build your own personal website, a lot of benefits.
The main reason is that personal websites are used as a communication platform for you to promote to customers, and are not subject to third party constraints, nor will they encounter problems such as auditing and blocking.
2. Identify areas
Like many people who do personal IP on the network, you need to focus on a certain area and dig deep.
Focus, in many cases, represents professionalism.
3. Provide high-quality content
Quality content is the most important thing, and customers are willing to pay for quality content.
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Does the content provide value to your users? Is it easy to understand? Do you have the necessary graphic (or video) instructions? Are the pros and cons of the product mentioned? Is the product easy to use and reliable? This is all important.
4. Gain trust
Affiliate marketing, where you make money by recommending products. Users trust you to buy what you recommend.
It's clear: trust is crucial to the success of affiliate marketing.
To be trusted, you must make yourself worthy of trust.
How do you gain someone's trust? Focus on your field, provide quality content, be sincere, and strive to gain the trust of more people.
My suggestion
Although a personal website is not 100% necessary, if you want to engage in affiliate marketing for a long time to make money, it is recommended that you build a personal website.
There are several advantages to having your own personal website:
1) More money: With a personal website, it is like having a base you fully control, others know how to find your website, add up, your website visitors more and more, more and more traffic, make more and more money.
2) High success rate of application: Using personal website to apply for alliance projects, the success rate will be much higher. In addition, most affiliate programs require you to have a personal website.
3) The content is always there: As long as your personal website works, the content will always be there. I used to use a third-party platform to publish articles, after a few months, the system suddenly reminded me: "You must immediately modify the xx article and submit for approval, the article can be displayed normally."
How to choose products
After you find the product you want to recommend, you have to ask yourself: Does this product meet the criteria?
- correlation
Is this product relevant to my field?
On the premise that users trust you, you recommend relevant products in your field, they place orders, and you make money.
If you recommend unrelated products to users in order to make money, it will be difficult for them to pay and will reduce their trust in you.
Take myself as an example, I focus on sharing the content of cross-border e-commerce and cross-border online earning, recommend the cross-border e-commerce selection tools recognized by myself, and the plug-ins of cross-border independent shops will be recognized by everyone. Would you think it strange if I recommended a vacuum cleaner with a high commission?
- Be worth buying
Ask yourself: Would I recommend this product to my friends?
Although the recommendation product can make money, but this product is really worth buying? How about cost performance? Would I recommend this product to my friends?
- Count for
Is this product valuable to users?
Standing in the perspective of the user who buys the product to think: what problem can this product solve? After buying it, is it really worth it?
What exactly do you recommend? Let me share a few thoughts:
- Research user needs
Carefully study your own field, communicate with your users, see what they need, and then find products.
Take my real experience as an example: I found that for cross-border e-commerce friends, how to choose products is a pain point.
I will send an article to share, I think it is easy to use the choice of tools. I stopped by to apply for the Choice Tools Alliance.
These friends use good tools, I get a commission, everyone wins.
- Learn from others
What products are others recommending? How do others recommend this product? If you think it's worth learning, apply to the affiliate program and recommend products to earn money.
If you have a network of peers, it will improve your learning efficiency.
- Active search
On Baidu and Google, in the major community forums, check everyone's comments, find out the problem, and then look for a product that can solve the problem, and then apply for the corresponding alliance project.
How do I join the Affiliate program?
I want to explain: in order to promote the products of merchants, some merchants directly operate their own alliance projects, while some merchants entrust professional alliance platforms (similar to intermediaries) to operate alliance projects.
How do I find the application page for the Affiliate program?
I share 3 methods:
1. Search for affiliate program directly in Baidu or Google
Search Shopify Alliance:
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Search Amazon Alliance:
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2. Search for merchant brands on affiliate platforms (such as Shareasale, CJ)
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World-renowned affiliate marketing platform:
19 popular affiliate marketing programs
3. Communicate and learn from peers
What are some factors to consider when joining an affiliate program?
- Commission standard: Before applying to join the alliance project, you should see the specific commission standard of the merchant. Shall we offer a one-time commission or a continuous commission? Is it a fixed amount or a percentage? Is there a minimum withdrawal?
- Expiration date: The expiration date is defined as "how many days after the user clicks on your link, order the product, you will get this commission." For us, of course, the longer the validity period, the better, but the validity period is determined by the merchant, and the common range is 30-90 days.
- The brand of the merchant: The larger the brand of the merchant, the more reliable their products tend to be, the lower the cost of trust for users, so they are more likely to buy the products you recommend. If I recommend an air conditioner to you, I will definitely choose a big brand of business products, and will not recommend miscellaneous products.
Well, that's enough for a primer on how affiliate marketing makes money, and I'll share more on that in the future.
