Affiliate marketing has become one of the easiest ways to earn huge amounts of money legally in a very short amount of time in the last 3 years.

With the advent of Covid-19 and the massive loss of lives and livelihoods, people start turning to knowledge sales and acquisitions. Even though affiliate marketing has existed for a long time, it has increasingly become popular after the covid-19 pandemic.

What is affiliate marketing?

Simply defined as the process of marketing and selling a product you do not own for a commission which is a share of the sales price. Better put, it’s the process of recommending helpful products to people who need it and can afford it.

Contrary to popular description, affiliate marketing is not a skill. It’s a business model that requires a combination of several skills.

One good thing about this business model is that as an affiliate marketer you do not require a ton experience or an office to start.

Affiliate marketing offers you leverage over other business models as it is flexible to run, you are offered a variety of products to choose one or more to sell as you please.

All that is required is learning how to show your products to the right people and that requires a couple of tools.

Must I use a website?

While having a website isn’t mandatory it’s certainly advantageous. Having a website allows you show another touch point to your potential customer. This means you can showcase how your product works and testimonials of your products.

Such a website when designed properly will definitely increase your conversion rate.

The Affiliate Marketing First steps

These refers to the actions an affiliate marketer is supposed to take after he has chosen a product for his prospective clients.

Step 1 – Registration

The very first step is to choose a platform, such as Expartnaire. When registering using this platform, you also get a course on how to sell massively as an affiliate marketer. You can learn more about this here

Step 2 – Product

Affiliate marketing is basically about presenting your audience with the right offer and getting a commission for that. For this transaction to take place, there has to be an irresistible offer or better still a product. On Expartnaire today, the highest selling product is the 72hr income Generator. This course shows you how to generate money with affiliate marketing in 72 hours.

Step 3 – Targeting

Every affiliate marketer needs to know who his customers are. What do they need and how the product he has will satisfy his clients. What are their age range and where is he likely to find them? When you have done this, it becomes easier to get the customers to see your product. These are called demographics.

You can learn more about targeting and demographics here.

Step 4 – Positioning

That is the marketing essence. The clients for this product abound. The crux is on the affiliate marketer to present the product to the customer as the solution to his/her desire and and get them to pay for the product.

Five Must Affiliate Marketing Tools

Advertising Platform

The choice of advertising platform is very important to the affiliate marketer. This is important because it determine who the advertiser can target and how much he or she would spend.

Platforms like Facebook and Google can reach a wide range of audiences, while a platform like TikTok would generally be better suited to generation Y and Z as these are the major age groups on TikTok.

It’s also cheaper to advertise on Google and Facebook and more easily accessible as compared to TikTok, Bing, as well as other as platforms that are not accessible in many countries.

Your choosen affiliate marketing platform helps also can be used to carry out research. This means when carrying out customer identification, you could learn more about your target customer by watching their interractions on the platform.

Note; it’s wiser to carry out customer research based on the product before attempting to choose an affiliate platform. Understanding who your idea customer is for that product should be the very first step in affiliate marketing.

When choosing a platform, choose one with a wide reach and low cost per thousand impressions. As of 2022, Facebook has the lowest cost per thousand impressions and has the widest reach of all social networking websites.

I’d definitely recommend Facebook for you, however it’s not without its problems and you should do well to get some training on Facebook ads before proceeding. Click here to find out more.

Traffic

In Affiliate marketing, traffic is one of your most important tools. Traffic is what generates sales and and helps guage the performance of your business.

But let’s slow down a bit. What is Traffic?

Traffic refers, simply, to the number of visitors that visit your website or a specific webpage or lead magnet you are giving out.

Traffic generally refers to the number of visitors, that comes in contact with you or your products through your ad you have used in generating sales for your products.

Traffic is the seed of sales. The more traffic you have, the more likely you are to make any sales. In other words, the more people you have coming through your ad funnel and seeing your products, the more sales you are going to get.

Efforts must be put towards generating Good traffic and these will in turn covert to sales.

There are basically four types of traffic namely;

• Organic Traffic: This refers to visits to your site gained through the organic search results.
• Paid Traffic: As the name implies, it refers to all paid ads that optimizes search results of your goods for your clients. Prospective clients get to see your products without literally hing for it.
• Direct Traffic: This refers to traffic that is generated when clients directly click on your link to buy your product
• Refferal Traffic: This is traffic or potential buyers that are referred to you from a source you don’t own or have control over.

Creative Ads

Most Marketing efforts, many times, are focused on increasing the number of visits to help increase sales or qualified leads.

Creatives refers to the various adverts that you put together in other to market your product to the public. As an affiliate marketer, your creative is your means of convincing, persuading d influencing your clients with strong reasons why they should check out your products over the different advertising popping out all over their screen.

These creatives could include Video, image adverts, Collection adverts, it can also be a mix of images, videos, audio, and other formats that get delivered to users.

Creatives as the name implies must grab the viewers attention, be concise and straight to the point. When your creatives are well delivered and served, your prospective clients, will automatically get the idea behind the product in one view.

Creating creatives for your products can be so much fun as you get to explore the different elements that your product ad will comprise of. Your creative as a tool is your means of reaching out and communicating to your clients.

You can learn more about making creatives that forces your potential customer to click on your ads here.

Product Affiliate Link

An affiliate link is a specific URL that contains the affiliate’s ID or username. This link contains a code that is unique to the affiliate marketer and to that product.

When a visitor checks out a product using the affiliate link, codes are stored on his or her web browser that tells the platform algorithm where that visit came from and to whose (which affiliate marketer) they belong. These codes are stored for 90 days.

This means even if a customer doesn’t buy after going through your affiliate link, but comes back to buy 30 days later, you still get credited the purchase simply because those codes are still active.

Through this link, the affiliate platform can record the traffic that is generated and track the sales of your choosen products.

The advantage of affiliate links is that they track sales and offer opportunity to those who are interested (affiliates) in selling another party’s products to do so without their sales going to someone else.

This is why it’s very important that when you have a prospect, you ensure they visit the product page via your affiliate link.

CRM Tools

Customer Relationship Management tools are one of the must haves for affiliate marketing. These are used to follow up leads and show them just how much the recommended products would change their lives.

Some CRM tools you could employ inlcides email marketing and WhatsApp marketing. Others include YouTube marketing and SEO marketing. These tools help you stand out in the potential customers mind and follow them up until they make a decision to buy.

On average, according to research it takes a customer about 7 times of contact with your products before a purchase decision is made. By employing a CRM tool, it makes this contact points cheaper because you don’t have to pay for them.

Learn more about CRM tools here

Summary

So there you have it. While having a website isn’t compulsory for affiliate marketing, having one does boost your chances of making and tracking sales as well an enabling you collect leads.

You can learn more about starting your affiliate marketing journey here.

If this post has been helpful or we left out something important, we would love to see it in the comment section.