Put simply, affiliate marketing means that you basically have to recommend a product or service to your audience and readers using custom tracking links, and then get a referral commission every time someone makes a purchase using your link. Affiliate marketing is a type of online performance-based marketing in which a business pays a commission to one or more of its affiliates for each visitor or customer that visits their website via the affiliate’s website through a custom link.
Because many top brands have huge marketing
budgets and running costs that they have to meet, affiliate marketing becomes a
viable option for them and a very good one for you as a blogger or content
marketer to make fast money from the comfort of your home.
The Basics of Affiliate Marketing
Here are some basic and common terms you
should know about affiliate marketing:
1.
Merchant: This is the retailer, brand or company that
you market for
2.
Affiliate: This is the advertiser or publisher (you and
me) who promote, advertise and make sales for companies using our affiliate
links
3.
Affiliate
marketplace: Also called the
“network”, this is the platform that connects merchants with affiliates and
also manages payments e.g. ShareASale
4.
Affiliate
link: This is a
special tracking link obtained from your merchant to track the progress of
your affiliate promotion.
5.
Affiliate
ID: Similar to the
affiliate link, many affiliate programs offer a unique ID or HTML code which
you can add to any page on your site where the product is advertised.
6.
Landing
pages: This is a unique
product sales or demo page that you can use to advertise your affiliate link.
Unlike websites, landing pages are more purposeful and convert leads better.
7.
Link
cloaking: Most of the affiliate
tracking links are either too ugly or long. You can use URL shortener
like Thirsty Affiliates to turn ugly links into links that can
be read and understood by your readers.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria
Great! So now that you have a basic
understanding of what affiliate marketing is, as well as some common terms used
in the industry, you should now learn why you need become one too. Asides the
money making benefits, there are a few others.
1.
Affiliate
Marketing is Profitable
Affiliate marketing is perhaps, one of the
most profitable online money making opportunities in the world. In Nigeria,
affiliate marketing is also very profitable, as there are many merchant
companies and web savvy online marketers.
Mr. Pascal Okafor, for instance, a blogger,
earned ₦1,000,000 from Konga.com affiliate programme, when he won the award for Best
Affiliate Marketer.
If you blog on specific niches such as web
technology and fashion, you can be sure to earn lots of money for every
customer you refer to buy. You only need to refer your readers from your
content and ads to make huge money.
2.
Affiliate
Marketing Attracts Low Cost
With affiliate marketing, you do not need
large investments, an office space, staff, expensive customer support services
or huge overhead costs. All you need is your website (which should cost as low
as $20), high website traffic and an excellent content that is strategically
marketed.
Also if you don’t have any money to start, you
can use free social media, website creation and plugin tools to start your
affiliate marketing business.
3.
You
Do Not Need To Create or Own a Product
As a plus to you, you don’t need to own or
create any product as an affiliate marketer. All you need to do, as the name
implies, is to select the products to sell, get the affiliate links and market
already created products that are owned by the merchants.
4.
Affiliate
Marketing is the Easiest Online Business
This is the easiest online business to start
since the merchants do all the hard work like making products, product
delivery, handling money transactions etc. Affiliate marketers are not
responsible for any of these tasks. All that they do is to focus on promoting,
marketing and selling their affiliate links on their own performance-based
terms.
5.
You
Can Earn Money While Sleeping
Yes, you can basically earn money from
affiliate marketing while you sleep. Once you have your affiliate links
strategically placed on your high traffic website(s), people can visit your
site and links whenever and from wherever they are, without you even being
online.
If they like the product, they can easily buy
it by just clicking the given links.
The only difficult thing to do is to check your inbox to know whether sales
have been made via your link or whether commissions have been paid. I bet that
doesn’t sound difficult to you.
To learn more,
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