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A Complete Guide: How To Get Started with Affiliate Marketing
Table of Content
Do you want to earn money from home?
Why should you start affiliate marketing?
What is affiliate marketing?
What are the different stakeholders in affiliate marketing?
How do you get started with affiliate marketing from the beginning?
Do you really need a blog/website to generate affiliate sales?
How commissions are determined in affiliate marketing?
What are the popular affiliate programs and networks?
Why do you need to add affiliate disclosure?
How to create content for affiliate marketing?
How to beat affiliates who are selling the same products?
How to promote affiliate products on social media?
How to use SEO in affiliate marketing?
What is the role of cookies in affiliate marketing?
How to use Google analytics to skyrocket affiliate sales?
Conclusion
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The above graph is taken from Google Trends and shows the term affiliate marketing's search results over the last five years.
It is visible that this performance marketing is growing and has excellent potential in the future.
Earlier affiliate marketing was seen as deceptive advertising because some dishonest affiliate marketers used illegal practices like putting ads with exaggerated claims and misleading data.
The aim of these unethical marketers was just to get clicks to earn money.
Like any business activity, this marketing method too needed ethics and strict regulation so that consumers' rights can be protected.
FTC took many initiatives and placed safeguards against dishonest digital marketers.
Now FTC mandates affiliate disclosure so that visitors can make an informed choice. It is a welcome step in performance-based marketing that will bring more transparency and win customers' trust.
You must be surprised to know that 81% of brands use affiliate marketing programs to promote the products and services.
More and more companies worldwide adopt it as a strong marketing strategy for increasing their sales to generate additional revenue.
Therefore, there is a vast scope for ethical marketers to make passive online income from affiliate marketing.
The marketers must understand that it is not a get quick rich scheme and needs a lot of hard work in the right direction.
This comprehensive guide on affiliate marketing will help you to build a successful passive income stream business from the beginning.
Do you want to earn money from working at home?
Well, there are no such magic tricks, but affiliate marketing can do wonder for you. It is a well-proven way to financial freedom. You can make it one of the passive income streams for you.
Here I will discuss what it is and how you can get started. Whether you are a newbie or already in this business, I am sure this guide will enrich your knowledge.
It has been a favorite task for bloggers to recommend products to their readers and earn handsome money. It is the best method to monetize blogs, and bloggers should focus on this from the beginning.
This marketing type is crucial for every blogger (non-bloggers) who wants to make an impressive income by sitting at home.
Many successful bloggers are earning thousands of dollars per month through this referral system of products and services.
Although there are various methods for monetizing blogs and sites, the two popular ways are ad networks and affiliate marketing. The ad networks have minimum traffic requirements, but you can earn good money with limited traffic through affiliate marketing.
The companies and brands either design their affiliate programs or partner with affiliate networks. Later in this article, I will discuss the strategies to find the right kind of affiliate programs in your niche.
You do not have to create any products to make money from affiliate sales. You have to sign up for some top affiliate programs, help prospects understand the products' usages, and bring them to the merchant website. Once they buy products or services, you would get your commission.
The most significant advantage is that you do not have to worry about making products, pricing, and shipping. The brands do heavy work and not you.
An affiliate's job is to introduce the product to the people and convert them into buying customers.
Moreover, once you signed in any program, you will get all the tools and techniques from the affiliate companies or networks to promote and advertise the product.
Many well-known bloggers and digital marketers generate their majority of income from this type of passive income marketing. But to be successful in this business, you need to make some smart moves.
We will discuss the strategies to increase sales. Stay tuned!
Why should you start affiliate marketing?
Are you fed up with a 9-5 job? I think you must have heard about the 40-40-40 plan.
Well, it is quite popular in America. It is nothing but working for someone 40 hours a week (for 40 years) and then living retirement life with just 40$ per month. Is 40$ per month enough for the golden years in the current century?
So should we look for extra streams of income? Yes definitely. Below are the few reasons why you should try this online income stream.
-It makes money for you while you sleep.
-It is a creative area, and there is always something new to learn.
-You can achieve financial freedom.
-You will have ample time and money to enjoy life.
-You can spend quality time with your family and friends.
-You can get rid of your debts faster.
-You can live life on your terms.
-No customer support.
-Work from home. No need to maintain a brick and mortar shop. No need to open moms and pops shops!
-You do not need to create a product to sell.
-You can get started with zero investment or at a very minimum cost.
-Moreover, if you already write blogs or articles, what is the harm in monetizing them?
Therefore, no doubt, it provides an excellent opportunity to fulfill your dreams.
What you need to do is follow your passion and hobby in letter and spirit, build content around some products you use and love, promote them with your targeted audience, and earn money.
What is affiliate marketing?
It is nothing but promoting and selling other people's products or services in layman language and getting commissions in return. The type of commissions and the amount you would get for sale depend on the affiliate program's policies. It is a revenue-sharing model.
William J. Tobin first started it in 1989. In 1996, Amazon came with an associates program that popularized the affiliate marketing at a global level. Many affiliate websites across the globe are being operated based on this model.
It is performance-based marketing because marketers get commissions only when they make a purchase or take some actions. So it is a cost per action or sale rather than cost per click.
In case of cost per click, the publisher need not worry about the conversion. Even if the visitor does not convert, the publisher still gets a commission in the cost per click method.
Therefore to become successful in this performance marketing, you should attract more targeted traffic to your blogs or websites. For example, if you write about fashion items but include links related to food products, there is a low conversion probability.
The audience you have built over time is more likely to trust you on fashion products than on foodstuffs. Try to promote the products about which you are quite familiar. Customers will buy if you can convince them through your writing and other means of communication.
You should include links to products that are more closely related to your niche and expertise. Promoting products and services links through content marketing is the most successful path. You should use product links in the context. Stand-alone links will not fetch a good result.
What are the different stakeholders in affiliate marketing?
For an affiliate sale, there are four stakeholders.
The person or company that owns the product or service is called an advertiser, brand, seller, merchant, vendor, or retailer. This advertiser takes the help of the affiliate army to sell its products.
Affiliates publish content around products, advertise and promote them.
These publishers promote products by writing reviews and comparisons on their blogs and websites. They build content around the usages of products and services and share their personal experience with their blog audience and following.
Since bloggers already influence their audience in a particular area or niche, it becomes easy for them to push readers to buy products. These readers may also become loyal customers of those products and services.
Suppose advertisers or merchants do not run in house affiliate programs. In that case, they may contact affiliate networks or market places like Clickbank and Commission Junction to sell their products by using a vast publisher army of these market places.
How do you get started with affiliate marketing from the beginning?
Getting started with affiliate marketing is not hard. You can start promoting affiliate products even free of cost, and there is no limit on earnings.
Many successful affiliate marketers are earning in 6-7 figures. But for them, it took hard work of many years before they hit these lucrative income numbers. They followed steps that work and avoided common mistakes.
Even if you are a newbie to online marketing, there is no need to worry. You can learn it from the beginning and apply the concepts to make your online business successful.
The best way to get started with affiliate marketing is with a blog/website. Buy your domain name. The domain name should be relevant to your niche from the SEO point of view. Free platforms come with many restrictions due to which you cannot effectively use special links. Therefore, self-hosting will pay high dividends in the future.
Select your niche in which you can create content for years without losing interest/enthusiasm. Sometimes we like some topics, but we cannot write for a long time on those subjects with the same spirit. The niche that you select should have enough demand.
You should find your passion or hobbies. The deeper you write, the readers will find it more useful and valuable. It will help in building trust and long term relationships with your prospects.
Join the market place in your niche, and you must research programs before signing up for them. In the beginning, do not enroll for more than three products or services. Just focus on a few profitable programs.
Select a few products which you use. You can better connect with your audience by sharing your own experience with these products. You may also promote products you love but do enough research before recommending them to your audience. Do not push the product for sale if that is not useful to readers.
Create engaging content around products. Make the content more shareable in the social network.
Keep in mind the best SEO practices for a strong content marketing strategy. However, you can promote links through various channels but do not underestimate the power of SEO!
Use tools like Pretty Link to make links better.
Provide value addition by creating landing pages for the products.
The contextual use of links does not annoy readers. Do not randomly insert them. Avoid too many links on a single post.
Try to use more links on your popular posts.
Share your posts and articles on different social media platforms and build a relationship with your followers. First, make the community on social media, establish your authority or brand, then promote product links. Do not start pouring links from the first day.
Use Google Analytics to monitor the affiliate campaign and create more engaging content on topics/blog posts most liked by the audience.
Create a Facebook group page and regularly post content and build community and followers. Practice reciprocity in the groups for mutual benefits.
Use Pinterest to promote your blog posts by learning and implementing the best Pinterest marketing strategies.
Optimize landing pages, build a money-making email list, and promote your favorite products by writing engaging and compelling email newsletters.
Add a resource page where you should mention all your recommendations.
You can insert links in your lead magnet resources like eBooks but read each program's terms and conditions. Some of them do not allow adding links in the eBooks. Like Amazon associates program does not allow inserting links in ebooks.
Make your blog or site user friendly and responsive.
This passive income stream looks very attractive but takes hard work. It may take some time for your first affiliate sale. Therefore be patient!
Do you really need a blog or website to generate affiliate sales?
You can do marketing with or without blogs. Apart from blogs, marketers promote their special links on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Quora, Pinterest, etc.
To advertise on social platforms first, you need to assert your authority on a particular niche. By regular posting of useful content related to your niche, you can build an audience. Before building trust and influence, it is useless to promote the links. While sharing links directly on social media, you should disclose that they are affiliate links.
Another aspect of marketing on social media is that you need to engage with your prospects and address their queries. Without relationship building, you cannot achieve more. You need to establish your brand before promoting links.
You can promote links through Facebook Groups. Build an active community in these groups.
Nowadays, many bloggers and marketers are rushing towards the Pinterest platform. It is just not a social platform but works as a search engine and a selling hub. To grow on this platform, you need to do keywords research and optimize your boards. You can create a pin for the product and add a link. Try to make a Pinterest board in your niche and then add pins to those boards.
You can grow your reach on Pinterest by using an automated scheduling tool called Tailwind. Using this tool, you do not need to pin manually and post pin in a specified time using its scheduler.
You must know that posting in social media at the right time has a significant impact on content engagement rates. This tool can help you in scheduling pins so that maximum Pinterest users can see them.
Quora is a question and answer platform and provides an excellent opportunity to promote products. You can search for your niche questions and insert links in your answers but avoid spammy behavior. It would help if you also asserted your authority by writing content in your niche to trust you.
Sometimes these social media block the affiliate links and also keep changing their algorithms. Therefore nobody knows how they will treat links in the future.
Moreover, some marketplaces approve requests from people who have their blogs or websites to publish links.
Therefore, you can not solely rely on social media for marketing. It is always better to have your blogs and email list.
An email list is your asset and the most effective way of digital marketing. You do not need to have a huge mailing list to earn respectable online income but provided that you have the right prospects on your list.
The blog helps in convincing the prospects by providing value addition. It is a famous quote that people do not buy products but product benefits.
And through the blog, you can show people the different benefits from a user perspective by writing various helpful articles.
Writing value-added content around the products is the way forward in performance marketing.
How commissions are determined in affiliate marketing?
Publishers work as a bridge/intermediate between the customer and the brand. The customer also gets valuable insights and helpful tips/reviews about the products at no extra cost.
So, it is an arrangement that benefits every stakeholder. The publisher gets its due in the form of commission.
The terms and conditions of the programs mention publisher percentage. Generally, the commission paid ranges from 1%-75% of referral spends. Some programs also pay a flat rate on a particular product.
Some programs have a multilevel compensation arrangement or plan. For example, if person A refers to B and B refers to C, then based on the program's design, member A will also be compensated for the sales generated by person C.
There are three popular ways to pay rewards to publishers based on different actions of the users.
Pay –Per-Click
In this model, you just need to send traffic to the merchant website. You do not need to bother whether users will sign up (buy) or not. Due to the possibility of manipulating traffic or fraud clicks, there is less pay per click affiliate programs. Frankly speaking, it is nothing but display advertising. PPC programs pay better for high quality and targeted traffic.
If you don't have a blog or website but have a significant following on different social media platforms, you can earn money with pay per click programs. Some of the popular PPC market places are IZEA, VigLink, and Linqia.
If you are looking for a sustainable passive income stream, then PPC is not the best model. They do not pay recurring commissions. They just have a flat-rate payment system.
Pay-Per-Lead
If someone clicks on your affiliate link and performs activities like filling out forms and signing up for newsletters, you will get the commission. Some of the programs pay additional commissions when the lead converts into a sale. ClickFunnels is the best pay per lead affiliate program.
Pay-Per-Sale
In this model, someone clicks on a link to a product and makes a purchase. Pay per sale is the best compensation method to make massive and steady money by selling products and services.
What are the popular affiliate programs and networks?
Your time is precious. Many marketers fail because they do not perform adequate research on networks before joining them. What is the point of wasting time promoting the wrong products and getting nothing at the end?
You should look for programs which pay you according to your efforts. Because it takes equal efforts to generate a sale, whether for a low or high commission product, so always try to find a top paying commission product in your niche.
Your success as an online marketer depends on the selection of the right products and networks. While choosing a product, you should keep in mind the interest of your audience.
You build trust and assert your expert's authority in a particular area by consistently writing many valuable articles. If you create quality content, people will start seeing you as an expert in your niche and believe that you know the subject very well.
If you recommend the products relevant to your niche, it will be easy to push them for purchase. They will not trust you if you recommend products that are irrelevant to your expertise. Will you get the same conversion rate? I don't think so.
Another important aspect is that you should refer a product when you have used or experienced that product/service. So recommend those products about which you know in-depth. Honesty will make your success sustainable!
Therefore, you should devote time to understanding the product's demand and trend you want to promote.
Here I would like to list some of the top affiliate networks to find your favorite product for promotion and advertisement. Before joining any program, just do not forget to read their terms and conditions.
Amazon Associates
Getting approval from this extensive program is easy. Amazon is the biggest online seller and has a massive trust in online consumers. No one can beat Amazon when it comes to the number of products. It has hundreds of millions of products.
ShareASale
It is one of the best affiliate marketing networks and has been in the market for 20 years. Brian Littleton founded it in 2000. It focuses on small and medium business products and services.
It has more than 4k merchants on its list and provides a vast range of products and services. You will find that more than 86% of affiliates worldwide are part of this marketing place.
The usability features are tremendous, and members can track clicks in real-time. It provides options to create deep and custom links. The deep links bring users directly to the product page instead of the merchant website. Deep linking has a significant role in increasing the conversion rate.
ClickBank
The commissions paid by this market place are generally high. Most of the products listed in this excellent affiliate network are digital, for example, online courses, eBooks, software, etc.
The digital products do not require production, shipping, and other logistic costs; hence vendors can afford to pay high commissions.
In Clickbank, the members can sort products based on popularity or gravity. High gravity means the product is most popular on this platform, and a lot of publishers are promoting that product. You can directly sort top gravity products and start promoting them. The commissions are paid quickly, unlike other popular platforms.
CJ Affiliate
It is one of the oldest platforms, previously known as Commission Junction, established in 1998. It is a leading global affiliate network system based on performance marketing and can manage multiple websites with a single account. No need to maintain different accounts for each site.
For top-performing affiliates, there is a content certified program that has many perks and benefits. Most of the advertisers offer cost per acquisition commission.
BlueHost
It is popular among bloggers and one of the cost-effective web hosting products. The hosting starts at only $3.95 per month. As digital penetration is rising rapidly worldwide, the demand for online products and services is also rapidly.
Therefore this is an evergreen product for hosting web services. Blue Host also provides a free domain name and email address if someone purchases a hosting service.
If you don't find your product or brands in popular networks, you can check for a stand-alone or in-house affiliate program on Google.
Just search for an affiliate program + company name.
Every marketplace has its pros and cons. Try to join 2-3 right market places and find reputed products or services for advertisement.
The interest of your prospects and consumers should be the primary focus while selecting any marketplace or programs.
Why do you need to add affiliate disclosure?
The disclaimer should look like:-
"
This page contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I will get some commissions with no extra cost to you. For more details, read the disclosure policy.
"
It is unethical and illegal if we do not share affiliate disclosure on blog posts. On the other hand, by sharing this, the blog becomes more transparent, and our credibility in the eyes of people increases. Affiliate marketing is nothing but winning the trust of readers and persuade them to look at our offers.
Affiliate links disclosure is mandated by FTC to protect you legally and the interests of the consumers. If you do not include it, then you may face legal scrutiny.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, if you are getting paid to recommend any product and don't know it, you deceive the customer.
The reason why disclosure is needed is that it promotes fair business practices and increases transparency.
The best practice would be to use it at the top of the page in clear language.
It should be mentioned on every page that uses affiliate links. Displaying it at the top represents a high transparency level, increasing visitors' trust towards the site and marketer.
You can also use it in the middle or bottom of the page, but it should be visible to readers without any hassle. The Pretty links tool can set it up for you just in a few steps.
Disclose your links with confidence! If you are providing value addition to your prospects, then what is the harm in disclosing them.
How to create content for affiliate marketing?
In digital marketing, content is the king. If you directly send a prospect to the product page through a link, he will less likely make a buying decision, and in the worst-case scenario (if he gets irritated), he can also abandon the page.
That's why providing value addition before taking him to the product page helps influence buying decisions.
Below are some of the best strategies to create engaging and compelling content. You need to focus on the audience's pain points and problems and address them through text and visual content.
Story Telling
Readers love stories than a factual product description. Storytelling is an art and can be an effective way in the affiliate marketing campaigns.
Consumers love to see some success stories of the other people or customer testimonials before deciding on the purchase.
Visual stories are more powerful than text-based descriptions. Telling a story through an infographic is a popular way nowadays.
Product Review
Do you make Google search for a product before buying it? Well, I think almost all internet users do that.
Product reviews are strong signals and greatly influence the buying decision of the customer.
Always write honest and detailed product reviews. While writing reviews on products and services focus on both positive and negative aspects.
By writing only positive aspects, you cannot win the trust of your audience. If you highlight negative aspects too and convince them that they are not significant hurdles by providing proper explanations, people will trust you more.
You should thoroughly research the product and targeted audience before writing any review.
Know-How of the product/service
Many prospects do not understand the usages of the products. Create step by step video tutorials/guides of the products and how they work.
The videos make prospects more comfortable and help in making a buying decision. Through short and concise YouTube videos, you can easily convince people to buy things.
For example, if you have any software tool to sell, you can create a short video explaining different aspects like downloading, installing, benefits, usage, etc.
Share your own experience: if you used the product or service, sharing your personal experience will build great trust in your audience and followers.
Product comparison
The comparison of products shows that you have seen the pros and cons of different products and have comprehensive knowledge of such products. But be honest while criticizing other products.
Resource page
Make a resource page and list all your favorite products or recommendations. Include product links with a high-quality clear picture of the product with a short description.
How to beat affiliates who are selling the same products?
There is a cut-throat competition in online sales. As a side hustler or newbie to online marketing, you need to work smart and increase visibility. Whatever niche you select for selling products, you will always find that there are already well-established competitors in that niche. To outperform competitors, you can use below pro affiliate marketer tips.
-Carefully select your niche and few good affiliate programs.
-Try out products and services before you recommend it to others. Your own experience/story with the product will build trust in prospects.
-Start your blog/website on affiliate marketing and make it SEO and user friendly.
-Build an email list and promote products by writing compelling emails.
-Send newsletters regularly with current/seasonal offers and discounts.
-Provide value addition through freebies and bonuses.
-Provide additional support and consultation services and invite them to question-answer forums to post a query and get quick help.
-Respond to comments in your blog posts. It helps in building a relationship and shows how cooperative and confident you are.
-Engage with your prospects on social media.
-Try to conduct feedbacks, surveys, and polls.
-Establish your brand and increase authority and position.
-Borrow the power of big bosses by conducting interviews and share their thoughts on your content. This type of exercise will help you in network building and increase trust among your readers when you share their thoughts and testimonial on your site and blogs. It definitely will enhance the credibility of your content.
-Study your competitors to get an insight into how and what products they are promoting in your niche. The expert publishers in your area have already established authority and crossed initial barriers.
-Learn PPC skills/paid advertisement and attract new customers.
How to promote affiliate products on social media?
People advertise affiliate products on social media because they get free and instant traffic. Another main reason social media is becoming a selling hub is that buying decisions are influenced by peer pressure.
Product reviews on social platforms also play an essential role in buying decisions. According to the Neilsen report, 92% of consumers believe in product recommendations from friends and family than other marketing forms.
It would help if you had a sound strategy to generate affiliate sales on social media. Without building authority over a niche, if you randomly post product links on social media, you may get clicks, but the conversion rate will be significantly less.
Therefore, to become a successful affiliate marketer on social media, you first need to establish expertise and win readers' trust.
Choose the right kind of social media, depending on your industry type and targetted audience. If you are a beginner to affiliate marketing, try to build your authority and followings only on a few selected social media platforms.
If you are new to Pinterest, an affiliate marketing strategy for Pinterest can help you to become a successful affiliate marketer.
By constant posting of value-added content, you need to build authority and increase the following. Every social media network has a unique way of working and requires a different strategy from other social networks. Not the same content work on each platform, so you need to create content specific to a particular social network.
There are many Facebook groups related to affiliate marketing, which you can join. Join those groups that have a large following and abide by their rules. Reciprocity is the key to the mutual benefits of the community members. Share valuable content related to the group and strategically drop your affiliate links but avoid spamming. Also, share other people's content that is useful for the group.
Try to engage with people by sharing, commenting, etc. Respond to the user queries related to your affiliate products and services.
Having your blog on affiliate products have many advantages. You can explain the product or services in detail with your personal experience. People would love to see product stories. The stories build trust regarding the products and inspire prospects to take action.
With the right kind of planning for creating suitable content for social media platforms and advertisement, you can get qualified social traffic to increase your affiliate sales.
How to use SEO in affiliate marketing?
Did you know that you can increase affiliate sales using SEO?
You can write useful blog posts on products you want to promote, but if it is not SEO friendly, it will not reach the adequate and right audience, as a result of which your affiliate marketing performance will not be good.
Performance marketing is all about the quality audience and not quantity. To get high-quality traffic on your blog or site, you must focus on SEO from the beginning.
There are two main advantages of writing SEO friendly posts.
Firstly, it reaches the targeted and quality audience interested in buying your products and services. If you target the right keywords, your post will reach the maximum people looking for your products.
Secondly, you will get organic or free traffic on your blog. It is crucial because once you have written SEO-friendly articles by targeting profitable keywords, you will keep getting continuous free organic traffic.
So, proper SEO makes affiliate marketing a sustainable and passive income generation source.
In performance marketing, qualified leads matter a lot. For such traffic, the content should revolve around more searchable terms or words. The more close words related to your product you target in your content, the more targeted audience you would get.
Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of on-page optimization. How do you know that the product which you want to advertise has adequate search volume or demand? Finding the search phrase through keyword research can increase your marketing outcome.
You are not the only one promoting the same product, but many big affiliate companies and smart publishers want to sell the same product and service. So the question is, how would you compete with them if you don't incorporate profitable search terms in content marketing?
These already established big companies or prominent bloggers rank high for general or broad keywords in the search engines.
The trick here is that you should find the profitable(long-tail) keywords as a newbie instead of targeting those broad keywords.
A long-tail keyword is three or more than 3-4 words phrase specific to a product. Such a long tail phrase tells the exact search intent of the customer about a product. For example, the "best belly burner weight loss belt."
While doing keyword research, you should focus on competitive keywords with adequate search volume and slightly less competition.
If you target very competitive keywords, it would be challenging for a new blog to rank for those terms in search engines. Your competitors already have much more domain authority and a strong backlink profile.
You can use free keywords analysis tools such as Google keyword planner and Ubersuggest.
A keyword analysis is a very crucial part of SEO, but you should also take care of technical SEO, On-page SEO, and Off-Page SEO. Make sure your web or blog posts are correctly getting crawled and indexed.
Also, make sure to use sponsored + no-follow tags, because search engines can punish paid links(affiliate links) by lowering SEO rank if you do not specify sponsored link attributes.
To maintain an SEO friendly blog and to keep the look and feel better of your website and blog, you can use tools like word press Pretty Link Plug-in.
As you know that special links are hard to remember and lengthy, this link cloaking tool not only shortens them but also provides useful analytics. You can see the number of clicks.
Do not use link cloaking for the Amazon Associates program. They provide their cloaking tool.
Pretty Link Plug-in makes the ugly link more readable and appealing. By using this beautiful and popular plug-in, you can give the ugly link a custom name.
If people are confused with a raw link, then they may not click. By the use of this tool, they can look less spammy. The appealing links are more shareable on social media, clickable, and hence increases the conversion rate.
Both on-page optimization and off-page optimization can bring more fruits to you.
What is the role of cookies in affiliate marketing?
Tracking of sales/lead is significant when it comes to affiliate marketing. Tracking helps the advertisers to assess the success of marketing campaigns.
The cookies have revolutionized affiliate marketing across the world. Companies use tracking software to track conversions and sales.
Also, tracking software generates product URLs for each affiliate with a unique ID so that credit can be given to the right marketer.
These links, when clicked, set a cookie on the visitor's system to track the sale.
The link includes information like affiliate ID, merchant ID, program ID, etc.
When a visitor clicks on the link, the affiliate ID is stored on the visitor's browser within a text file called a cookie. The cookie remains on the browser for a specified time (for example, 30-60 days) until it is deleted manually.
So even the customer does not complete the purchase process on the first click and comes back after a few days and makes a purchase, the credit is still given to the original ID.
Before joining any affiliate program, the marketers should know about the cookies of those programs.
How to use Google analytics to skyrocket affiliate sales?
Tracking sales is an essential aspect of any marketing campaign. If you have to maximize the conversions, you need to determine where your qualified leads are coming and what else you can do to attract more such prospects.
You should invest your time and money where you can get maximum benefits.
Suppose you have written 100 blog posts, but as you know that there is no guarantee that all blog posts will perform equally in attracting your audience.
By tracking leads and conversion, you can focus more on those blog posts that are performing better to maximize your revenue.
You need to find on which blog posts your readers are spending more time. The blog posts and topics getting more qualified leads are your actual niche, and you should concentrate more on those topics.
You should write more blog posts and articles on those topics or similar subjects/products.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool for bloggers. It is a free tool and simple to use. Using this tool, you can track landing pages, keywords, session duration, bounce rate, etc.
Also, do not forget to submit your blog or website to the Bing webmaster tool. Bing is another big search engine which is getting more search engine share day by day.
So make the best use of these analytical tools to optimize campaigns, maximize sales, and increase affiliate marketing earnings.
Conclusion
I hope this guide helps online entrepreneurs to start their own affiliate marketing business. There is a vast scope in the future for digital marketers.
Just with a computer and an internet connection, a person can start affiliate marketing online and earn good residual money.
Making passive income streams through online sales is feasible with the hard work and if the proper efforts are made in the right direction.
Before joining any marketplace, you should know how affiliate marketing works. Although making a good income may take time, you can make your affiliate business bigger when you understand affiliate marketing fundamentals and put in hard work.
To become a successful affiliate marketer, you need to build your online audience through content marketing, join some right market places, select profitable products, and recommend them to your prospects.
By starting this online venture, you can become your own boss and get rid of 9-5 jobs!