Beginners guide to affiliate marketing

Do you want to earn money on your website? One way to do this is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing, is when you market another companies products, by showing ads on your website. You get payed every time a person for each click on ad, each view of ad or if an ad leads to a sale or a specific event. The payment is typically a specific amount or percentage of the sale.

When you want to start with affiliate marketing, there are more ways to do it. You can either make a website with a specific content and then find ads that match your content. You can also find the ads first and then make a website with content, that leads to the highest conversion of your ads to sale. Your goal is to get the highest conversion of your ads.

Affiliate networks

An affiliate network, is a website that links between the company that offers the ads (called advertiser) and the person that shows the ad on his website (called partner or publisher). There are many affiliate networks you can choose, and often it is a benefit to be a partner in more affiliate networks, because you then have more ads to show. You will also often see that an advertiser is represented in multiple networks.

Some popular affiliate networks are:

Commision junction

Clickbank

E-junkie

Amazon

E-bay

Affiliate vs. AdSense

One of the most popular programs to join for showing ads on your website, both for publisher and advertiser, is AdSense. AdSense is a program from Google that reminds a lot of Affiliate, but is actually not.  You can read more about AdSense and what you should remember, before choosing AdSense here.

With affiliate, you choose a specific ad to show on your website and you have to apply for each ad. With AdSense, you apply for the whole program and then AdSense decide which ad they will show on your website. This depends on your content and which visitors you have on your website. AdSense has an intelligent algorithm that automatically choose the best ad to show on your website.

With affiliate, you know before you show ads on your site, how you will earn money (clicks, views, leads, sale) and how much you can earn. With AdSense, you will always earn money per click (and a little per view) but how much money you earn depends on which ads AdSense choose to show on your website.

Many peoples experience with AdSense compared to affiliate, is that you can earn more money with affiliate, but it is easier to get started and earn money with AdSense. You could also consider to have both AdSense and affiliate ads on your website.

Different ways you can get paid

CPA is an abbreviation for Cost-Per-Action and is the same as Cost-per-sale. With this payment method, you get paid when a visitor click on an ad and then buy a product (perform an action). The CPA value is how much you get paid for each sale.

CPC is an abbreviation for Cost-per-click and with this you get paid when a visitor click on an ad. Often you only get paid for a unique visitor (e.g. unique IP address). Cost-per-click is often very rare in the affiliate network business, because this doesn’t guarantee a sale for the advertisor.

CPL is an abbreviation for Cost-per-lead and with this you get paid, when you generate a lead. A lead is when a visitor click on an ad and then do a task on the advertisers website. This task could be to buy a product (sale), to subscribe to a newsletter, answer some questions, creating a user profile, share on Facebook, like on Facebook etc. When a visitor does that, you have generated a lead. CPL is a very popular payment method in affiliate networks.

CPM is an abbreviation for Cost-per-mille, Cost-per-impression or Cost-per-view and with this method you get paid per 1000 views of your ads. This is a very rare way to get paid in affiliate networks, because it does not guarantee a sale for the advertiser.

CPO is an abbreviation of Cost-per-order and with this payment method you get paid per order the visitor make on advertisor’s website. The difference between CPA (Cost-per-action) and CPO (Cost-per-order) is that CPO is often a percentage of the sale, where CPA is a fixed amount per sale. However CPO can also be a fixed amount per sale.

Ads, text ads or deep linking

There are more ways to place an ad on your website. You can place a graphical ad on your website. You can place a text ad, which is the same as the ads you see in Googles search result page in the right side.

You can also make deep linking where you place a link in your content to a page on your advertiser’s website and get paid when visitors click on that link.

How to get successful with affiliate marketing

These 6 advises may help you succeed with affiliate marketing:

• Find the right topic to write about: you get most success if you choose a topic that match the ads you are going to show on your website. It is also best if you choose a topic that you have interest in, because then you write the best content.
• Choose the right affiliate ads: The more relevant the ads you choose are for your content, the more you earn on affiliate marketing.
• Write good content: Write high-quality content, that make the visitor attracted to the ads.
• Market your affiliate website: Use linkbuilding and social networks to market your affiliate website, and attract visitors. Read about linkbuilding here.
• Analyse your visitors and clicks: Use statistic to analyse your visitors and clicks. I recommend you to use Google Analytics to track your visitors.
• Optimize your affiliate site: Use the statistic results to optimize your affiliate site and generate a higher conversion.

How much can I earn with affiliate marketing?

This is a good question and if you ask most people doing affiliate marketing, they wont answer, because they are afraid that you might steal your idea. It is also very different what people earn.

But typically, if you have years of experience with affiliate marketing, you can actually live of it. Other people is living part time of it.

Is it easy?

Yes and no. It is easy to get started on affiliate marketing and to start earning money. But you have to work very hard. You have to write good content and choose the right ads the first many years of your carrier  Once you got more experience, you can outsource the writing of content and then earn money without working so much.