The Basics of Affiliate Marketing

In this post, we’re going to cover the basics of affiliate marketing, how to become a ClickBank affiliate, and how affiliate marketing works.

Are you ready to start working from home? Or, do you want to start living your life on your own terms? Maybe you don’t want to work for someone else anymore. Whatever the case, understanding the basics of affiliate marketing is a good place to start.

What is affiliate marketing, and how can it help you to make money?

We’ll also fill you in on what it takes to succeed as an affiliate, and where you can go to get started with creating your own affiliate marketing programs.  

What Is affiliate marketing?

First, let’s make sure you have a clear understanding of what affiliate marketing is. 

In a nutshell, it means that you promote someone else’s products and brands online, and earn a commission each time a consumer makes a purchase as a direct result of your affiliate marketing post. 

Affiliate marketers may also get paid per lead or per click, and not exclusively per sale.

Currently, over 80% of companies use some form of affiliate marketing in their advertising strategy. 

The two most important players in the world of affiliate marketing are you (the affiliate) and the vendor (also known as the product creator or the brand/retailer.) 

The vendor could be a well-known brand, a small business, or even an individual trying to spread the word about services they offer.

Remember that the brands you’re working with likely already have a marketing strategy in place. So, as an affiliate marketer, you’re a strategic piece of a larger marketing campaign. You’re likely one of many other affiliate marketers that are also promoting the vendor and their products.

There are lots of different ways that you can promote a product or brand online as an affiliate marketing professional.  

You can create a niche blog and write posts praising a brand. You can become a product reviewer or a social media influencer. Or, you can run your own e-commerce store and sell the brand’s products directly to consumers. You can even create a coupon website that allows customers to get a percent off of their purchases from the brand you’re promoting. 

In short, working as an affiliate marketer allows you to play to your interests and skill set. 

Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing Companies

Now that you have a better understanding of the affiliate marketing definition, let’s talk about how you can get started by making your own affiliate marketing websites. 

First of all, you’ll need to find a specific brand, product, or service to promote. 

We strongly suggest that you promote something that is important to you, that you genuinely enjoy, and, if possible, that you’ve had direct experience with in the past. 

The good news is that there are tons of different affiliate marketing categories. 

You can promote cooking products, health and fitness centers, baby products, spiritual services, travel companies, software, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. 

It’s a good idea to work with established affiliate marketing programs that can provide you with a list of available vendors and brands to choose from. This works better than trying to reach out to companies on your own.

This way, you’ll be able to see the potential commission you could earn per sale. You will also learn more about the products or services you’re selling and receive an affiliate link to include in your posts.

This saves you serious time and allows you to promote multiple vendors and products at once. 

Affiliate Links

Affiliate links are links that send consumers back to the vendor’s site so that they can buy the products or book the services that you’ve promoted on your affiliate site. 

Affiliate links also let the vendors or ClickBank know that your website, social media post, or online review was responsible for making the sale or getting the click. 

This process makes it simple to track commissions, which is how you get paid. Plus, especially if you work with ClickBank, it’s easy to make your own affiliate links to include in your content.  

When you include these affiliate links in your posts, it’s up to you whether or not you’d like to tell consumers that you may earn a commission for every sale.

Most affiliate marketers choose to be upfront with their readers because a sense of transparency is incredibly important in today’s market. 

Growing Your Market 

So, how can you be successful in the world of affiliate marketing? 

The best thing that you can do is position yourself as an expert in your particular product niche so that your readers develop a genuine sense of trust in what you have to say. 

This means that you’ll need to constantly conduct market research, get responsive in the comments sections, and post as often as you can without sacrificing quality.

You can also consider getting paid traffic to your site, studying up on SEO tactics to ensure your content shows up in the search engine results, and work other influencers in your specific niche to help you increase your conversion rate (AKA, make more sales.) 

Are You Ready to Start Making Affiliate Marketing Websites?

If this post has convinced you that affiliate marketing is a good fit for you, we want to help you get started. 

At ClickBank, we can connect you to countless vendors in our affiliate marketplace, so that you can quickly and easily find the products and services you’re the most excited to promote. 

We’re transparent when it comes to helping you understand how much of a commission you could earn from each click or sale. We also provide you with other essential statistics that make it easy to pick the right products. 

What are you waiting for? 

Create an account with ClickBank today, and start earning passive income from home.

Sign up here!