What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?
An affiliation is an arrangement between a seller and its affiliates. The seller provides products, branding and promotional materials. The creator promotes the seller’s products, and in return receives compensation in the form of commissions.
The task of a brand partner is to advertise products to its community and encourage its members to visit the site, store, make purchases or contact brand representatives. The main tool for evaluating the effectiveness of an affiliate is affiliate links, i.e. links assigned to a specific influencer. In this way, a brand working with a person to promote their products checks their effectiveness and pays commissions based on this.
Important!
Affiliates receive commissions most often for sales finalized after going to a store’s website through an affiliate link. However, closing a sale is not always a prerequisite for getting paid – in some industries, acquiring a lead (contact information about a potential customer), signing up for a free trial or newsletter, or even downloading a free app is enough.
What do affiliate programs consist of?
As a rule, participation in referral programs (affiliate programs) is free. All you have to do is find a program (e.g., by searching the Internet for the phrase “affiliate program” and adding the industry you are interested in), and then register on the appropriate site. After creating an account, it will be possible to generate an affiliate link, permanently assigned to the affiliate’s account. It is this link that is key to promoting products and services and earning money in the process.
Example:
Ms. Karolina established a partnership with ABC Publishing under the affiliate program. She registered on the program’s website and received her link. From now on, she can recommend the publisher’s publications, for example, on her social media, and add the affiliate link to her posts. Each time one of Ms. Karolina’s content recipients purchases a book using the link, Ms. Karolina will receive a commission or the commission will be credited to her affiliate account – so that she can withdraw the money once the threshold specified in the terms of cooperation is reached.
What after registration? Affiliate program step by step
Here is an example of a single transaction handled with the participation of an affiliate program:
- The brand promoter places its affiliate link in various places – emails to customers, social media posts, on its website.
- The recipient of the promoter’s content clicks on the affiliate link and goes to the linked page.
- The recipient makes the purchase and finalizes the payment.
- The system operating the brand’s affiliate program registers the transaction and assigns it to the promoter’s account.
- The affiliate participant’s account is credited with a commission per transaction.
- The brand partner withdraws funds from the account once the threshold is exceeded.
How to start the adventure of affiliate marketing? First campaign
Stories are heard from all over about how affiliate marketing is a model to make good money and even achieve a mythical passive income. What’s more, affiliate marketing is said to be able to increase revenue by up to tens of percent, all with minimal commitment. Conveniently overlooked, however, is the fact that you first need to follow a few necessary steps to make any money from affiliates. Here they are!
Step one: Choose the niche in which you want to operate
While in theory you can tackle promoting products from different industries and market segments at the same time, grabbing multiple pigtails doesn’t make much sense at first. Instead, find a slice of the market that you know and are comfortable with.
When looking for the right niche, focus on what you have experience in, what you are interested in. Also, don’t forget about your audience – they are the key piece of this puzzle. You need to be able to establish contact and relationships with the target audience that is part of your chosen niche.
Example:
Mr. Tomasz worked for years in the tourism industry – he has an understanding and contacts in it. With this in mind, he decides to get involved in affiliate programs that deal specifically with tourism. However, this is a very broad industry, so Mr. Tomasz decides to narrow his search to tourist attractions for families with children at the Polish seaside. It’s a specific, promising niche in which he finds himself and has a chance to earn a lot of money from referrals.
Step two: Find the right affiliate program
Now that you have chosen a niche in which you want to move, it’s time to find a program that will give you the best prospects for growth and earnings to begin with. To do this, a thorough search of the Internet is necessary.
Important!
If you can’t find an affiliate program that matches your chosen niche, try to broaden your search a bit – a precise and very narrow niche is often a good starting point, but it’s not always possible to commit to an affiliate program with such set conditions.
What if there are too many programs and it’s not easy to choose a specific one? Pay attention to the key terms of the programs:
Offered commission rate
It usually ranges between 5% and 20%, although there are situations in which brands offer higher commissions of up to 30%. Such terms, however, occur only in highly specialized industries and are offered to valued partners.
Conditions for disbursement of funds
Rarely do affiliate program developers allow arbitrary withdrawals. The rule is to set a threshold from which withdrawals are possible. In this way, the brand secures increased commitment from affiliates, who need to earn more in commissions to be able to withdraw.
Cookie expiration date
Every transaction initiated using an affiliate link has an “expiration date.” This means that if a potential customer clicks on the link and goes to the store’s website, they have a certain amount of time to complete the transaction – it can be 7, 14, 30 days, or even longer. The more expensive the recommended products, the usually longer the purchase process. The expiration date of cookies is therefore of considerable importance if you are recommending products to your audience, for which you have to pay a lot.
Scope of brand support
Some affiliate programs count on more involvement and self-reliance from affiliates, while others offer a range of support materials. If you’re new to affiliate marketing, pay particular attention to whether the brand you want to work with provides affiliates with support materials, such as graphics, banners, promotional videos or access to the company’s knowledge base.
Step three: build (and develop) your personal brand
Don’t count on high sales of recommended products and earnings from commissions if… nobody knows you. In affiliate marketing, it’s absolutely crucial to have an audience who will gladly click on the ads you show them. Take care of your website, blog, active social media profiles. You can also promote affiliate links in YouTube videos, shorts on TikTok or even offline – all you need is a QR code on a poster or a wrapped company car.
If you want to create a strong personal brand, you can’t build it based on affiliate activities alone, because it will then very likely be perceived as insincere. This is why – although we give this step as the third on the list – it should actually be step zero. Assuming, however, that you already have a brand, focus on developing it properly – expanding your audience and generating traffic.
To do this, it is necessary to engage in other marketing techniques: SEO (if you have a blog or website), social media (if you are active on social media), video marketing (if you create video content), and content marketing. The latter will come in handy in any case, because it is the creation of engaging, sincere and helpful content that will most powerfully help you build a community that will trust your judgment – and the fact that you will recommend valuable products to them.
How to be effective in affiliate marketing?
It is not enough to “drop” links to an affiliate’s store under your own posts to start making money from it. The exception is if you already have an army of fans for whom you are an authority. Otherwise, you still have a lot of work ahead of you.
Content strategy
An essential element of successful affiliate marketing is a content marketing strategy. As we mentioned in the previous section, content marketing is an integral part of affiliate marketing. If you want to make serious money from commissions, you need to prepare a plan where you create content for your audience that will be interesting to them, and that will trigger a purchase need in them. The more engaging your content is (such as Facebook posts or TikTok videos), the more traffic you will generate, which will translate into more potential customers.
Affiliation based on trust
Valuable content for your followers is of colossal importance. Especially if you want to build a strong, trustworthy personal brand that will naturally drive your audience to buy, rather than an ad post. Transparency – including proper, legitimate labeling of advertising collaborations and recommending products that you’re able to say more about than “I recommend because I get paid for it” – is also important.
Tracking progress
Marketing is largely based on trying different activities and then analyzing their results in detail. You may not always be able to tailor your content to your audience perfectly, but you can always evaluate after publication what worked and what failed. Check how your content and ads are performing, analyze the reactions of followers to links, look at data on emails sent, read and clicked, study website traffic. Each of these elements is important to further develop your brand and increase referral revenue.
Relationships with companies whose products you recommend
Maintaining good relationships with affiliates can result in better terms of cooperation, access to higher quality promotional materials, and access to previously proprietary knowledge – for example, about the brand’s product audience. Some affiliate programs reach for gamification – they add achievements, tasks to be completed and points, the collection of which translates into achieving higher and higher levels of cooperation. This in turn translates – for example – into higher commissions or lower payout thresholds. Before you choose an affiliate program, check whether it offers these kinds of solutions.
Summary
Affiliate marketing carries great potential, but taking advantage of it is not a matter of course. Building a partnership with a brand requires considerable commitment, but it pays off with the promise of high earnings on commissions and the possibility of a long-term, entirely performance-based relationship.
