Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: What You Need to Know

If you’ve ever came acrossTim Ferris's iconic bookon how to just work four hours per week, you’ve probably dreamed of sipping a Mojito on a beach while your money worked for you in the background. One of the main ideas he constantly talks about is the concept ofpassive income.

After all, having an income chart like this is the main goal of many online entrepreneurs:

For many entrepreneurs looking to build an online business or marketers looking to monetize their web traffic, affiliate marketing is often how they got started with generating income.

会员营销是世界上最受欢迎的在线产生被动收入的方法之一，并且它不断增长。实际上，据报道，会员营销支出increase to $8.2 billionby 2022 — up from $5.4 billion in 2017.

If you’re looking for a complete guide to affiliate marketing, read more to find out how you can promote products as an affiliate to create an additional source of income.

会员营销通常有四个政党：

• 分支机构：The promoters of the product
• 产品创建者：产品的创建者
• Networks:The networks managing the affiliates
• Consumers:The end users of the product

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You don’t always need a network to become an affiliate, but the other three parties (the affiliates, the product creators, and the consumers) form the core of an affiliate program.

Who are the affiliates?

一个下属,也被称为一个出版商,可以是一个individual or a company. Typically, these are other bloggers or content creators operating in the industry of the product they are creating.

他们通过creati促进产品或服务ng content like blog posts, videos, or other media.

他们还可以通过发布广告，从SEO捕获搜索流量或构建电子邮件列表来推广其内容以获取交易。

When one of their visitors creates a transaction, which could be a purchase or submitting a lead form, the affiliate gets a commission. How much commission is structured depends on the affiliate program terms.

Who are the merchants?

A merchant, also known as the product creator or advertiser, is typically the creator of the product or services. They offer revenue sharing and commissions to people or other companies (affiliates), which have a significant following on their brand.

The merchant can be a company like HubSpot, which offers a commission to every affiliate who’s able to get their visitors to make a purchase.

Or it can be an individual like Pat Flynn, who offers an affiliate program with his podcasts.

The merchants can be anyone from a solopreneur to a big company, as long as they are willing to pay their affiliates to help them gain a transaction.

有时，商人甚至不必是产品创建者，例如Amazon Associates Program.

Who are the affiliate networks?

An affiliate network acts as an intermediary between the merchants and their affiliates. In some cases, a network is not necessary, but some companies choose to work with a network to add a layer of trust.

The network manages the relationship and provides third-party checks and balances. Third-party checks can be important because they bring down fraud rates.

Some popular networks includeClickBank和ShareASale.

一些商家选择与ne的子公司工作twork because they lack the time or resources to track, report, and manage payments to the affiliates. They might also choose to work with multiple affiliates or publishers within the affiliate network.

Who are the consumers?

The consumers or customers are the ones who makes the transaction. They are the ones who purchase the product or submit the lead form in order for the affiliate to gain the commission.

Let's say you owned a popular knitting blog that saw 100,000 hits per month, and a knitting supply company contacted you about promoting their needles and yarn on your website. As an affiliate, you'd place links to their products throughout your blog content. In this case, you'd receive affiliate income if a visitor landed on your blog and took an action — either a click, form submission, or purchase.

我们将更多地谈论getting paid in the next section. In the meantime, here are some common affiliate marketing models:

按点击付费（PPC）：The affiliate gets paid for all clicks that were generated, regardless of whether a lead or sale happened. This is fairly rare since all the risk is on the product creator.

Pay-Per-Lead (PPL): The affiliate gets paid for every lead they generated. This could be an online form submission, trial creation, or any pre-purchase. This is a shared risk on both the merchant and the affiliate.

Pay-Per-Sale (PPS): The affiliate gets paid for every sale they generated. This is the most common model since all the risk is on the affiliate.

Now, let's talk about how to get started with affiliate marketing.

When it comes to affiliate marketing, most people think it's a process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s or company’s products.

While affiliate marketing can seem straightforward — just find a product you love, promote it, and earn a piece of profit with every sale you make — there are actually a few moving parts you need to a monitor.

1. Choose a platform and niche.

To be an affiliate, you need to have influence. Establishing a website or blog that specializes in a niche is the best way to establish influence. Whether you focus on finance, personal health, business, or even cats, a niched blog or website will help you gain influence and build an audience.

Affiliate marketers build audiences through blogs (onWordPress或者HubSpot),viaraybetapp新闻通讯, or even onYouTube或者other social media channels.

2. Build an audience.

A large, engaged audience is a highly valuable asset for any blog or website. Having people who read, view, and engage with your content can help you make affiliate income.

The best way to build an audience is to first establish who your target audience is, and you canfind your target audienceby researching competitors, monitoring your traffic, and conducting first-hand research by talking to subscribers and customers.

建立这个小组后，成长和cultivate your loyal online audience通过有针对性的内容和电子邮件。给您的听众有理由阅读并参与您的内容，他们也会找到购买推荐产品的理由。

3. Sign up for an affiliate program.

The best way to get started with affiliate marketing is by signing up for an affiliate program like theAmazon Associates或者HubSpot会员计划. After signing up, you will get an affiliate link that contains a unique ID. You can then use this link in your content.

加入会员计划时，通常没有前期成本，但是您的可变持续成本将取决于您想要推广产品的方式。如果您选择将内容外包或运行广告外包，那么这些费用将从您的口袋里出来。

4. Choose which products to promote.

Choosing the right product to promote, working with the right company, fostering relationships, and updating content are all core essentials of excelling at affiliate marketing.

According to帕特·弗林, one of the pioneers of creating passive income through providing value to his audience, there are two important rules when it comes to affiliate marketing:

• Only recommend products as an affiliate that you’re extremely very familiar with. If you are not confident in the product and do not feel it will help people, do not promote it.
• 永远不要告诉任何人直接购买产品。始终根据您的经验和您所做的方式推荐产品。

When it comes to choosing the right products,David Gonzalez— founder of an affiliate management agency, suggests that you should think about these three components when choosing a product to promote:

1. 您的听众：产品会引起他们的共鸣，并使他们感激您推广吗？
2. Product quality & value:Would you advocate your best friend buying it?
3. Profitability:Does the offer have highly competitive conversions & payouts?

After reading these recommendations, do any products come to mind?

5.创建出色的内容来促进您的会员产品。

To see the best success with affiliate marketing, you need to create genuine and remarkable content that promotes your chosen products. Write a roundup blog post of your favorite products. Create comparison charts that discuss the merits of similar products. Interview other users and fans of the products to showcase different opinions.

Regardless of what kind of content you create, ensure it features authentic reviews and mentions of your affiliate products. Avoid discussing and promoting products you haven't used yourself.

6. Optimize and track.

Whenever your visitor clicks on your unique affiliate link, a cookie is inserted in their browser to track actions.

When they make a transaction that is a qualified action (could be a sale or lead form submission, depending on the terms of the program), the merchant is able to record this action and attribute it to you as an affiliate so they can make a payout.

You should track your own affiliate content, too, to see what has performed well and what you can improve and promote. Understanding what content resonates best with your audience will show you what to focus on for future affiliate marketing opportunities.

7. Get paid.

付款方面有不同的结构，该结构根据会员计划条款而变化。

Commission payouts by the company are usually given on a monthly basis, but this varies depending on the affiliate program terms.

It could be a weekly payout or a monthly payment for all the leads or sales you've made.

You'll want to pay attention to the payout structure when choosing an affiliate program to join, which ultimately depends on the goals you have.

You might want to understand the commission structure of the company or product creator. Are you looking for a commission per sale or commission per lead generated? Are you looking at a recurring commission or a one-off payment?

根据您的目标，这将影响您选择的产品，计划如何推广产品以及您想要投资的时间和资源。reybet雷竞技下载

For instance, if you choose to promote your content via paid ads, then that’s a cost you have to account for. You will have to compare how much you’ve spent to promote each piece of content or to generate each purchase against how much commission you’re getting for each referred sale.

Or, if you have a blog and website, then you will have to pay for hosting. In this case, this should be a flat fee spread out across all your referred sale.

使用此营销计划生成器to calculate how much you need to invest to get a basic marketing plan up and running.

您可以从会员计划中赚多少钱？

您可能想知道，建立的分支机构的收入是什么？（已建立的分支机构是全职工作的分支机构。）嗯，这有所不同。我看过超级会员earn upwards of $100,000 per month.

Making money from an affiliate program is more about the profits than the revenue you’re getting.

An affiliate making $5000/day might be worse off than another affiliate making $500/day with no cash outflow because the former might be spending most of his revenue on paid acquisition.

At the end of the day, before becoming an affiliate, you have to align your expectations to your earning potential. What kind of industry or niche you operate in, and what kind of work you do depends a lot on how much you want to make.

If you focus on ads like Adwords or Facebook to promote your affiliate products, how much money you invest is as important (if not more) as how much you make.

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Too often do I hear this misconception:会员营销is dead.

In today's landscape of online marketing, people often mention that some variant of X is dead — SEO, email, mobile, etc.

时间的测试是一个很好的测试。如果某事暂时呆了一段时间，那么它会持续一段时间。

Everything evolves, and there are tactics that don’t work the exact same way as they did before. Affiliate marketing, of course, is no exception to that rule.

会员营销从一项富裕的计划演变为需要您与受众建立真正的信任的事情，以收获您投入的作品的回报。

At the end of the day, becoming a successful affiliate marketer as a beginner requires you to nail down the fundamentals of marketing. Authenticity is hard to fake, especially when it comes to building your own personal brand.

A brand that promotes products incessantly without any regard for bring real value to its audience will find affiliate marketing to be a short-lived source of income. Choosing the right products to promote, stemming from a true passion for what the product does, forms the basis of all your promotional activities.

While there are many tactics to scale your promotion, the golden rule of affiliate marketing stays the same: only promote products you love and treat your audience like humans.

Build your own brand, choose products that you love, create authentic content and you will be on your way to building a real source of passive income.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.