Affiliate Marketing For Dummies

Ted Sudol, Paul Mladjenovic

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119628248
• eBook ISBN: 9781119628323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Get Your Piece of the Hottest Business Online Today!

Affiliate marketing is your route to earning some serious bucks. Thousands of companies both large & small like Amazon, Sears, Best Buy, Overstock, Lowe's, Priceline & others have programs so you can profit from the thousands of products they offer.

Affiliate marketing is ideal for bloggers looking to monetize their work. This is a multibillion-dollar market, and there are 10+ million people involved in the biz worldwide. There's always room for more because the opportunity keeps growing as more and more companies offer affiliate programs. Affiliate Marketing For Dummies shows you how to get a slice of the pie!

• Choose the right affiliate product or service for you
• Find the best affiliate programs for you
• Find the best affiliate marketing strategies

Affiliate Marketing for Dummies is your friendly step-by-step guide to getting in on this moneymaker—big time.

Part 1

Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing

IN THIS PART …

Discover what affiliate marketing is and how you can profit from it.

Find out why you should become an affiliate marketer. One reason is affiliate marketing allows you to avoid the headaches of traditional business.

See how to avoid the pitfalls and traps that trip up new affiliate marketers and deny them the success they deserve.

Figure out how to use your interests and passions to catapult your affiliate marketing business. You can capitalize on what you already know and profit from it.

Check out the various affiliate marketing programs and networks so you can choose the right ones for you.

Chapter 1

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining affiliate marketing in a nutshell

Discovering how the internet plays a role in affiliate marketing

Getting set to become an affiliate

An affiliate marketer is someone who introduces others to products and services. The affiliate marketer doesn’t develop the product, ship the product, or handle the payment to the merchant. He simply refers others to products and/or services offered on the internet, and when a sale is made, he earns a commission.

This chapter gives you an overview of affiliate marketing: how it works, how the internet plays a role, and how to get started.

Getting a Handle on How Affiliate Marketing Works

Referral marketing has been going on for hundreds of years. In pre-internet days, you might have gone to networking events and handed out business cards. The hope was that you would be able to help out a fellow attendee by giving him a lead that would result in a purchase. The attendee you helped with the lead would return the favor. In a sense, referral marketing was a value exchange that could be summarized as “you help me and I’ll help you.”

However, a lot was left to chance. You weren’t sure whether the cards and leads you handed out would lead to any reciprocal benefit from those you helped. There was no easy way of tracking when purchases were made and the referral sources for those purchases.

The internet changed everything. Now there was an easy-to-use tracking mechanism (the cookie) that could show you when a purchase was made, what it was for, and the referrer who was due the affiliate commission.

William Tobin, founder of PC Flowers and Gifts, was the first internet affiliate marketer. He started the PC Flowers and Gifts affiliate program in 1989. He was granted a patent for the idea in 2000. Amazon’s affiliate program was begun in 1996 and quickly grew in size and importance.

The value exchange on the internet is the same as it was with networking events and business cards. The blogger or website owner shows you a new product, helps explain a problem you’re having in a post, or convinces you to buy a program. To return the favor, the affiliate marketer is hoping that you’ll make a purchase through one of his referral links. The cost to the purchaser who buys through an affiliate link is exactly the same as if he went directly to the manufacturer.

When we visit websites and they give us solutions to problems we were having or otherwise help us, we want to reciprocate and help them out. We do this by purchasing through their affiliate links.

Whether you realize it or not, practically every blogger, every celebrity, every website, and every company on the internet today is an affiliate marketer. They are all making money day after day from this largely passive means of earning extra income. See that ad on your favorite movie star’s blog? Click on it, and if it’s a pay-per-click ad, your star gets paid. See that link at the end of their recommendation? Click on it, and if you make a purchase, they get paid. There are also campaigns that are sent via email or social media. Click on the ad or make the purchase, and in most cases someone gets paid. See those links on someone’s Facebook or other social media page? Trust us; someone is getting paid, and you may as well join the crowd and start discovering how to earn your share.

Profiting from Internet Promotion

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing system. It basically means that if and only if a sale is made or a specific action is taken does the referring affiliate marketer get paid. In the following sections, you find out how the internet gives you plenty of opportunities for affiliate marketing, how the internet automates the process, and how affiliate marketing is different from other internet businesses.

Multiplying opportunities

As we note earlier in this chapter, one of the problems with earlier versions of referral marketing was that there was no way to accurately track purchases and the original referrers who deserved the reward for generating the purchases. The internet changed all that. A system of cookies, or little bits of code stored in your browser and in your affiliate dashboard, is able to track purchases. The cookie can also track the affiliate marketer who promoted that sale so she can be credited and receive the affiliate commission.

Companies just love a system of marketing where they have to pay for that marketing only when a sale is made. The salesperson (in this case the affiliate marketer) pays all the expenses of marketing (however minimal, like hosting, software, tools, domain registration, and so on). What’s not for a company to love? More and more companies are getting onboard the affiliate marketing bandwagon. So the opportunities for the affiliate marketer to profit are expanding with the growth of affiliate programs.

The internet also multiples the opportunities you have to profit by orders of magnitude simply because of the size of the internet audience you can reach easily and economically. Depending on your product or service, your audience may vary from an enormous audience of millions down to a small, specific audience that is looking for exactly what you have to offer. In the past it would not be practicable, or economically possible, to seek out and advertise to these small, widely dispersed groups.

In contrast, with the internet an affiliate marketer can potentially put her promotion before millions or even hundreds of millions of potential purchasers. The affiliate marketer’s offer of goods or services is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Any one of the billions of internet visitors could potentially visit the affiliate marketer’s site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and make a purchase. In essence the affiliate marketer’s “store” is open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Automating the money flow

Now with the internet, a visitor to an affiliate marketer’s website can click on a link, make a purchase instantly and electronically, and have that order fulfilled and the physical product shipped within days by the company. The affiliate can both track the sale and depend on payment at the merchant’s or affiliate network’s next payout date. If the product is digital, often its delivery is within minutes.

Setting up a way for people to pay on your website used to be a long, complicated process, sometimes requiring you to apply for and qualify for merchant status. Now it’s a simple, almost instantaneous process. The affiliate program you’re considering usually has a number of banners, images, and graphics that you can simply copy and insert on your web page. You choose the sales piece that best fits with your site, product, and promotion. Copy the link the company generates, which has your unique affiliate ID, and paste it on your web page or promotion where and how you want it to appear. (Flip to Chapter 7 for more details on setting up a website for your affiliate marketing business.)

In addition to cookies facilitating the tracking of purchases and referrers, and directing the affiliate commissions to be paid to the right affiliate marketers, other changes facilitated money flow. Electronic payment vehicles such as PayPal became widespread and easy to use. Today it’s simple to put a PayPal payment button on your site to facilitate your customer making a purchase. PayPal can track the purchases, process refunds, and take care of other parts of the purchasing puzzle.

There are also many “shop” building programs that can automate and handle many of the chores of setting up your “shop” where you can offer your affiliate products. For example:

• Shopify (www.shopify.com/), a shop building application, handles many of the technical and design aspects of setting up your shop. They have a library of templates that you can use and modify to make them your own. Depending on your goals, this can dramatically speed up building your affiliate business.
• WooCommerce (https://woocommerce.com/) is another “shop” building solution. They call themselves the e-commerce solution. They are probably the largest shop and e-commerce solution around. The program is open source and built on the WordPress platform, so they are sure to be around for quite some time. (See Chapter 7 for an introduction to WordPress software.)
  Since WooCommerce is open source and the largest shop building or e-commerce solution, many software vendors and developers offer integrations, hooks, and extensions that integrate their product to work with it or extend its functionality. Over 400 extensions plus an equal number of integrations handle store chores such as payment, returns, shipping, marketing, shop management, and so on. The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing
• Part 2: Building on the Basics
• Part 3: Advanced Affiliate Strategies
• Part 4: Going Professional
• Part 5: The Part of Tens
• Appendix: Tools and Resources for Affiliates
• Index
• About the Authors
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement