Affiliate marketing is when you get paid commission for promoting products or services for other companies on your own website or blog.
The door to door salesmen were the first generation of affiliate marketers. They had a product and they would go around the neighbourhood selling that product. Imagine if you’re a pen salesman. You would go around the neighbourhood and sell the pen to the customer for 50 rupees and you will get 15 rupees as commission for each pen you sell. Imagine you’re earning 15 rupees only by marketing and selling it.
Door to door salesman is dead but today it has evolved into affiliate marketing.
How affiliate marketing is better than door to door for sale?
1. Saves you the exhaustion: In affiliate marketing you don’t have to go door to door hoping to sell a product. You can just create a website and start working. That website can make money for you even when you’re sleeping, you don’t have to walk around the neighbourhood carrying a heavy box with all the products.
2. Target Audience: Unlike door to door sales the audience for affiliate marketing is wider and not limited to a particular area. Usually door to door sales is limited to an area or a city but in affiliate marketing you can sell a product sitting in Mumbai to someone in Korea.
3. Not restricted to one company: There are no contracts in affiliate marketing. You can advertise products for 3 companies simultaneously. And you can stop working whenever you want.
Parties involved in Affiliate marketing:
1. The affiliate also called the publisher: The affiliate is you. You act as the middleman between the affiliate and the customer. You create all the marketing material that is required to attract the attention of the customers like advertisement banners, landing pages etc. Your role is to find potential customers, products to sell, create marketing material and reach the customers.
2. Affiliate networks: these networks are marketplaces where products and services are sold by companies. Networks serve as the middlemen between the affiliate and the merchant. One can log into a network and find hundreds of products or services to promote. A network will include products and services from a variety of verticals, such as dating, gaming, weight loss products and many more. But affiliate networks are optional, you can choose to work directly with a merchant. These merchants sometimes also have their own affiliate programs.
3. The advertiser or merchant: The advertiser is the company who owns the products and the services. Usually all companies have their marketing departments but affiliate marketing is a way for them to make money through low risk. There are some companies that are solely dependant on affiliate marketing for selling their products. The company pays the affiliate only when the affiliate sends in a conversion. Some examples are Uber, amazon, Flipkart etc
4. The Traffic source: This is where you get your potential customers from. You usually create a website to sell and advertise your product but how do you attract customers. Some websites sell ad space on their sites, this is how they sustain themselves. There are two forms of traffic source:
- Direct source: Purchasing ad space or banners from sites directly.
- Ad networks: A marketplace for a number of different websites. Smaller blogs deal with networks instead of multiple advertisers.
5. The Customer: This is the person who eventually buys the product advertised on your website. Your job is to target potential customers and then persuade them to buy the product or service.
