Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It? 5 Reasons & How to Nail it

There are many myths and opinions (both negative and positive) about affiliate marketing on the Internet, making it hard to decide whether it is worth getting into affiliate marketing or not.

But we will guide you. This article will help you understand this marketing technique better, understand whether it is worth getting into affiliate marketing and learn about its best practices.

What’s Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a strategy in which you promote and advertise a company's products or services in exchange for a commission. Check out our guide to learn more.

To understand affiliate marketing, you first need to understand who is involved in affiliate marketing. There are three types of affiliate marketing:

• Companies that offer products or services. Companies create affiliate programs and set their rules, procedures and commission rates.
• Subsidiaries. These are website owners, bloggers, people who have traffic and want to make money online from it. They join affiliate programs by promoting the products of the above companies and get rewards.
• Affiliate networks. An intermediary entity that connects companies with affiliates and earns commission from that match. An example of an affiliate network is ClickBank, whose business model is to connect new affiliate offerings with e-commerce entrepreneurs, retailers, small businesses, and marketplaces.

It remains quite popular as a way to grow and generate revenue. According to Google, the trends in affiliate marketing are:

Google Trends

With a basic understanding of what affiliate marketing is, let's move on to a more detailed explanation and understand how it works.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

In simple terms, an affiliate has a blog, YouTube channel, social media page, etc., where they post content about the product they are promoting. The affiliate hopes that their audience will see the product on their page, hit "like" and make a purchase.

But you came here for a long answer, right? Now let's break down the affiliate marketing process with a real-life example. For example, ActiveCampaign is a SAAS marketing automation tool. To expand their customer base, the company has an affiliate program. Below is a screenshot of the program page.

Certification

In this program, ActiveCampaign explains their rules and values:

• If the prospective customer is a paid customer of Activecampaign, your brand will pay an affiliate reward.
• The commission rate is 20%of the subscription fee. If your customer pays $ 2, 000 every month as a subscription fee for ActiveCampaign, you will be paid $ 400 every month.
• If multiple customers are acquired and the customer continues for a long time, commissions will increase to up to 30%.

Is it going to make money? But how can Activecampaign be a prospective customer registered in a paid program?

Affiliate links solve the problem. When you register for an affiliate program, you will receive a referral link with a unique identifier. This is a link to put on your blog post and YouTube video explanation.

When someone of your viewer clicks this link, it will move to the ActiveCampaign page. ActiveCampaign tracks your unique identifier through this link and records that this visitor has come from your promotion. When a prospective customer purchases a subscription, ActiveCampaign puts it in your name and starts sending 20%of commissions every month.

That's it. Affiliate is a pretty simple process.

So how to make money. In the above example, I paid a commission from the purchase. This model is also called CPA (acquisition unit price). However, there is also a PPC (click billing) model, in this case, a commission occurs each time the audience clicks an affiliate link.

The last point to understand about affiliate marketing is its legal aspect. The U. S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has provided regulations on all websites to disclose paid promotion in that content. If you have a blog and want to add an affiliate link to the article, you need to have an exemption to indicate that the content contains an ad.

You can see the mechanism of affiliate marketing. But is it worth doing? In the next section, we will help you find the answer.

5 Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing Is Worth It

Affiliate marketing is a profitable activity if you enter. According to Statista, companies are expected to pay about $ 8. 2 billion in 2022 to marketing affiliates to sell their services and products.

However, this type of online marketing should be considered not only for market size and payment. There are some other reasons to consider.

Reason #1: If done right, it’s an effective monetization strategy

If you want to make money from viewers as YouTuber or blogger, it may be difficult to choose the best strategy for you.

Affiliate Marketing is one of the simplest and most effective approaches and is perfect as a channel that produces the first revenue. It is easy to fix the content a little to make the product ad and affiliate links organically matched. In addition, since the advertisement is naturally displayed in the content, it is effective to avoid banner blindness problems.

Reason #2: You can have effective business growth with affiliate marketing

This applies to the business of creating an affiliate marketing program, inviting publishers and creators to cooperate in the sales of our products.

Affiliate programs basically outsourcing a part of the marketing for a fee. Let's introduce how to use affiliate programs:

• If you are a small company, there may not be a large and experienced marketing team that can be effective as an affiliate. You may not have a ful l-time marketing specialist.
• Affiliate marketers usually have high interest in specific places. Therefore, if your product is related to these audiences, you will be more likely to come to your site and buy it.

Therefore, in affiliate marketing, bloggers and content creators will help you to create promotion content by targeting highly relevant prospects. You only need to set an affiliate program, track the link, and pay a commission to the creators who bring your customers.

Reason #3: Affiliate marketing is scalable

If you choose affiliate marketing to turn traffic into a profit, it would be relatively easy to expand its scale.

You can increase traffic to pages with affiliate links:

• Invest in search engine optimization and target multiple keywords.
• Provide additional paid traffic in search advertisements, posts to social media, advertising, podcasts, and other sources.

You can also add affiliate links to more products in the post. There are many companies that have an affiliate program and you can choose from them. You can also participate in affiliate networks and find related programs there.

However, if there are too many links, you may lose reputation, so be careful about the latter method. I always want to make sure that my content is interesting, real, and that it has not advertised many products artificially.

Reason #4: No need to create and maintain a product

If you are confident that you can create an exciting content that helps viewers to sell products, why do you need to develop your own products until the time and resources process?

For affiliate marketing, jump into the promotion stage immediately using the products already developed by other companies.

Another advantage of selling other people's products is that there is no need to support customer services or returns.

Both are very important aspects of selling products, and companies hire the entire team to cover these areas. The products you sell are not your own, so you don't need to handle customers or returns. It is a company that sells products.

Reason #5: No initial capital needed

The ultimate advantage of affiliate marketing is that there is no startup cost.

Create hig h-quality content, and if the readers are interested, register in the affiliate program (free of charge), acquire links, add product advertising organically, and introduce affiliate links. Just receive a reward. That's it.

Investing in SEOs and social media/ search advertisements to increase traffic and eventually increase affiliate income, but at first you don't have to spend money.

In summary, affiliate marketing is an interesting and effective approach to generate profits from website traffic and sell more products. There are many persuasive reasons for companies and publishers/ creators to enter the affiliate marketing business.

But how can you make the most of affiliate activities? First of all, let's introduce some best practices that will help you increase your sales income from your business.

5 Ways to Make Affiliate Marketing Worth it (For Businesses)

We are always looking for new ways to increase revenue, regardless of whether they are selling services or selling physical products.

Affiliate Marketing is an excellent approach to support it. However, as with any marketing strategy, it is necessary to do it correctly to get the best results. Therefore, this time, I will introduce a list of valuable best practices that should be considered when starting affiliate marketing.

1. Promote your best products

The affiliate marketing industry is a quality game, not quantity.

The affiliate program is ideal for the following:

• Hig h-priced product
• The best quality product that provides the greatest value to the buyer.
• The above two points (the best scenario).

And there is a logic behind it. Publishers prefer not to flood content with many affiliate links. The ideal is a few. So, in order to earn more money from these links, publishers prefer to promote expensive products because they pay high fees.

In terms of quality, it is difficult for creators to advertise poor products. Therefore, they usually use the affiliate program with the best products.

2. Work with affiliates who have a passion for your products

Affiliates talk about your products in content, so it's very important to explain them.

If you use your product in the past and choose the affiliate marketer you love it, it will be the result:

• A more detailed explanation of the benefits of your product that they have experienced personally.
• The person who explains your product truly believes that the product is the best, so the content tone and emotion are more positive.

In other words, your partner will not only advertise your product because you pay, but also want to recommend it to your friends and audience.

3. Partner with affiliates who resonate with your target audience

If you do it correctly, affiliate marketing can reach a highly relevant and relevant audience with the needs and pain of your product.

However, in order to use this level of audience targeting, it is necessary to confirm that they are cooperating with the appropriate affiliate marketing staff. Please check before starting work with the developer:

• If the viewer is interested and the fans trust affiliate opinions.
• If the viewer's interest, needs, and pain are related to the product you provide.

In general, if you have just started affiliate marketing, it's best to start with a niche influencer.

4. Be competitive with your commissions

If you decide to try an affiliate marketing approach to grow your business, the market is saturated and you should keep in mind that competition is fierce.

About 80 % of all companies have some affiliate programs. Therefore, if your offer is a low commission or unfair conditions, most affiliates will ignore it and flow to other companies.

Therefore, it is important to check what competitors provide to affiliates, follow them, or provide better.

A good way to increase competitiveness in the market is to pay a lifelong commission, like the ActiveCampaign program introduced this time. Compared to on e-time payment, this method is more interesting because for affiliate marketing staff to create sustainable cash flows.

5. Optimize landing pages to increase conversion rate

Don't forget that affiliate success is not just how many visitors can be called on landing pages. These visitors need to move to the page and purchase them.

Therefore, if the landing page is not optimized, affiliate efforts can be wasted. Traffic comes to your page, but the conversion rate and affiliate sales are lower.

Therefore, it is necessary to test the landing page, confirm that it is optimized, then pass the URL to the affiliate to advertise.

In summary, affiliate marketing is a great way for companies to make money, but there are important best practices to follow to make the most of the affiliate programs.

Let's focus on the second player Affiliate Marketter and share the recommendations for them.

7 Ways to Make Affiliate Marketing Worth it (For Affiliates)

Affiliate Marketing is a relatively little effort to earn passive income for those who basically have traffic sources and audiences, such as bloggers, creators, and webmasters.

However, affiliate marketing does not want someone to link the entire content and click it. There are many other things to consider as an affiliate.

But don't worry. Here are the seven best practices that affiliate beginners should consider.

1. Promote products you have an experience with

Usually, it's a great habit to start by advertising products you have used personally.

There are two certain reasons to take this approach:

• You have already established your own opinions, so you can talk about products without investigating customer reviews.
• Rather than praising the product, talking about experiences using the product, it seems that your opinion is more credible and ethical.

Let's see what this actually looks like.

There is a great example of Android Authority's smartphone review.

Credit: AndroidAuthority

Before writing something, Android Authority's teammates use their smartphones for a while and write down what they like and hate. The team starts writing reviews after experiencing smartphones personally.

This "personal experience" gives their reviews greatly reliability, increasing the possibility of readers clicking affiliate links to buy mobile phones.

2. Create engaging and valuable content to promote a product

When performing affiliate marketing, the content is the main trading partner and a trading partner.

Before starting to think about putting affiliate links, you need to prepare and prepare content that people will read and like. Interesting content increases brand awareness, reliability, authority, is more likely to be clicked on affiliate links by being liked and trusted by readers.

For example, PCMag. com guides are useful and attractive content, a great insight for affiliate marketing.

Credit: PCMAG

The above guides explain how to build a home security system yourself and do not have to pay for security services.

PCMAG explains the process in detail and guides readers about security cameras, smart locks, sensors, and all connections.

This article contains a lot of "Amazon Associates" affiliate links such as cameras and locks. However, it is possible to click on these affiliate links, as you can buy and set up a security system yourself to save a lot of money.

3. Learn the basics of affiliate marketing

You don't need to fund the affiliate marketing, but you need to invest in another time and effort. Affiliates are activities that require knowledge, and whether or not they succeed depends on your experience and expertise in the field.

Therefore, you need to start learning how affiliate marketing works, how to practice, process, and tools.

Mastering this strategy is relatively simple, and there are many step s-b y-step courses and guides online (such as Udemy's free course). It is also effective to participate in the affiliate marketing forum (eg, a Facebook group or a community like a STM Forum). Finally, consider asking an experienced professional for guidance or mentor.

4. Focus on growing your audience first

Some creators start affiliate marketing before developing audiences and organic traffic. This type of affiliate depends on advertising, SEO, and social media.

But this approach is not sustainable. Because people from these marketing channels are not as involved in your content as usual.

The best practice is to follow you and concentrate on creating a permanent audience that always reads your posts. In other words, building a solid and wel l-available reader base before trying to get a reader.

5. Focus on growing your email list first

The earlier best practices of the best practices are applied if you want to make a profit from the email list.

Yes, e-mail marketing is still alive. And it is a bad habit to increase e-mail followers, just to sell affiliate products. You should consider having some kind of newsletter or reprinting that subscribers will be happy to read.

It is a good opportunity to promote your e-mail with affiliate links when your email subscribers are getting bigger enough and that they are actively consuming your content.

6. Promote products that resonate with your audience

Relationship is an important factor in determining the effects of advertising. Marketing partners are proud to be one of the most relevant advertising display methods because the product promotion is organically integrated with content.

However, in order to ensure a high relevance, it is necessary to carefully select affiliate programs and products to be sold. Also, make sure that advertising products match your audience interests and needs.

Let's take a look at the youtube channel for hiking and camping lovers, SHUGEMERY.

Source: YouTube, SHUGEMERY channel

The screenshot above is from the video on the clothes and accessories worn by the channel presenter during winter hiking. As you can see, SHUGEMERY uses the explanation field to put affiliate links for all clothes introduced in the video.

SHUGEMERY subscribers are campers and hikers, so they probably need a special winter clothes for winter camping trips.

7. Monitor and analyze the performance of your affiliate links

The last advice is to track affiliate links and check the performance. The general affiliate marketing indicators are as follows:

• Number of clicks on affiliate links.
• Link conversion rate
• Click percentage
• Profit per click.

By properly tracking affiliate marketing statistics, you can immediately check and optimize which links and content are not working as expected.

In conclusion, you can make a stable source of revenue by making a profit from traffic in affiliate marketing, but it is necessary to make sure that content is relevant and requires the product advertised by the audience. there is.

Now Over to You

So is affiliate marketing worth that?

The answer is Jesus, but it is necessary to do it correctly to get specific results. The answer is equally applied to the content creator who wants to earn money from traffic, and the business that affiliates want to "out source" sales and marketing.

Whether you want to incorporate an affiliate outreach into your marketing strategy, do your best for digital marketing!

Our blog has many other interesting guides, analysis and comparison. Please take a look!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1. Is affiliate marketing actually profitable?

If you rely on organic traffic and do not plan to post paid ads, there is almost no affiliate marketing cost. In other words, all profits from the affiliate program are net income for you.

Q2. Is becoming an affiliate worth it?

That's right. If you have a viewer and choose a product that resonates with their needs, it's worth an affiliate.

Q3. Is affiliate marketing a good way to make money?

Successful affiliates can earn $ 20. 000 to $ 150. 000. Affiliate income depends on the size of the audience, advertising, the effects of the offer, and many other factors.

Q4. Affiliate marketing vs. direct marketing: what’s the difference?

The main difference between affiliate marketing and direct marketing is that in affiliate marketing, product ads are organically embedded in related content and hardly distinguish them from content itself, but in Direct Marketing, ads are independent. It looks like a reader.

SONA KALANTARYAN is a senior digital marketer with a creative background. A big fan of movies and optimized landing pages. Lead the writer by sharing the best practices and performing them in the right way!

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