If you work in marketing, you’ve probably heard of affiliate marketing already. But if you’re thinking of starting your journey as an affiliate marketer, you might want to hear more about it first. Affiliate marketing is a way to earn passive income by recommending, sharing, or promoting the products or services of a business. The business that creates the product or service is known as the merchant.
According to SaaS Scout’s 2020 Industry Report, affiliate programs drive anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of all sales for advertisers. This goes to show how much potential there is in affiliate marketing.
This guide will introduce you to the basics of affiliate marketing, including what you need to know before getting started. If you’re interested in learning more about affiliate programs, you can check our earlier post about the launch of our program.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is also referred to as “performance marketing”, in reference to how sales employees are typically being compensated. The industry as a whole is also sometimes referred to as “performance marketing”. In affiliate marketing, a merchant pays its affiliates for referring traffic or customers to its website. Typically, merchants will pay affiliates a commission based on either a CPA (cost per acquisition) or a CPL (cost per lead) model. Under a CPA model, affiliates are paid based on the number of visitors to the merchant’s website who take some specified action, such as completing a purchase or filling out a form. In a CPL model, affiliates are paid when a lead is generated, such as when a visitor provides their contact information on a merchant’s website. Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing model in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is also referred to as “performance marketing”, in reference to how sales employees
If you are a blogger or social media influencer, you can use affiliate marketing to monetize your loyal following. When you have built trust with your audience, they are more likely to convert into customers, which will earn you more commissions.
Affiliates are only paid after a desired action, typically sales, takes place. This is good for merchants because it removes the uncertainty about whether a marketing investment is in fact profitable.
Affiliate programs and networks
Affiliates are people who promote a business’s products in return for commission. Supermetrics, for example, offers affiliates 20% of each sale that they generate.
An affiliate network is a group of affiliate programs and affiliates. The main difference between the two is that an affiliate program only has affiliates that promote their products, while in the network, affiliates can join and promote multiple products and services in different categories. The network manages all transactions internally and gets a cut of the transactions. Therefore, by joining a network, a company needs to pay for both the network and the affiliates.
Affiliate marketing pros and cons
Affiliate marketing cannot be used as a shortcut to earning a high level of passive income. To better understand what you’re getting yourself into, here is a list of the pros and cons of affiliate marketing:
Pros
- Source of passive income – You’re able to generate passive income. Once you create your optimized content and embed your links, you tap into a profitable source of passive income. This allows you to dedicate your time on your main source of income, whether it’s a full-time office job or your own business.
- No major investments – You don’t need to make any significant investments with regards to money or time. Once you set up your website and join the affiliate programs, all you need is unique content and your referral links. Getting started doesn’t require you to be a marketing professional with many years of experience under your belt.
Cons
- High level of competition – Getting started with affiliate marketing is easy but it also means that competition can be intense between affiliates. You’re competing for leads and clicks and trying to find the most promising affiliate programs, while avoiding those that are fraudulent.
- No control over offers – As an affiliate marketer, your control over the products or services you’re promoting only extends to choosing the affiliate programs. After that, you have no control over what you promote. That’s why you should choose the affiliate programs carefully.
How to Succeed in Content Marketing
Stage 1: Identifying Your Audience
If you want to be successful in reaching your target audience, you need to be clear about who you are trying to reach. Developing target personas will help to ensure that everyone in your organization understands who your content is meant for.
It’s important to be clear about who your target customers are so that you don’t waste time, money, and energy trying to reach people who will never buy from you.
Stage 2: Assessing the Landscape
Know Your Opponents
After you speak with your customers, take the time to understand your competitors. This can be tedious, but understanding your competition is important. HubSpot has a tool that allows you to quickly get information on your competitors. If you don’t want to use software, you can get the information yourself, but it will take more time.
Get to know what content your competitors are putting out there, how often, and how it is received. This research will save you a lot of time and energy later on when you start publishing more content yourself.
You could spend weeks and months doing a full-on content audit. If you want to go deeper our blog team goes into serious detail here, so in the spirit of expediency, here’s where I recommend expending the most time and energy:
- The types of content thriving on your competitors’ sites: Is one of your competitors the king of the morning blog roundup? A connoisseur of the modern e-book? A SlideShare ninja? By investing the time to look through the company’s blog, case studies, resources, and library pages you can often identify specific genres, types, or titles of content that thrive with their audience. Also take note of the types of content that are getting any media pickup or garnering massive numbers of social shares–doing so can help inform your publishing playbook. Track Maven (disclosure: Track Maven is a HubSpot customer) is a good source of help for this type of competitive intelligence.
- The nature of content failing on competitor sites: Similarly, take note of what content falls flat–this is harder to do with content behind forms, of course, but easier to do when you take a look at social sharing buttons or blog comments as possible proxies for hard numbers. If it’s impossible to get any context on what is not working, not to fear–you can get a bit more context when we get into keyword research later on.
- The factors that seem to contribute to the hits and misses: Hundreds of factors contribute to content’s success (or lack thereof) but give some thought to whether any patterns exist in their hits and misses. For example, is most of their content created by a single author who is a true thought leader in the space? Is it on one very narrow topic where the company has developed a devoted following? Is it during a specific time of day or shared by a specific geographic of industry-based audience?
When creating a content strategy, it is important to learn from your competitor’s mistakes rather than trying to replicate their entire strategy. Similarly, if you can identify what makes a piece of content successful, you can use that information to improve your own content.
You should focus more on your customers than your competitors. Take the time to understand what your customers want and need, but don’t give your competitors too much credit.
Stage 3: World Domination (Okay Fine, Content Domination)
Set a Baseline and a Finish Line Goal
Publishing great content will improve your brand and business. Next year when you request more money or more employees, you will need to show how much your content strategy has improved since you started. To do this, keep track of your unique website visits, social media following, bounce rates, average time on site, conversion rates, and engagement.
After that, come up with some achievable goals for the next year, and plan to check in on your progress half a year later so you can change your plans if necessary. Additionally, make sure your team stays concentrated on the things that matter, and set some yearly goals that everyone in the organization can help with, so that everyone understands that producing good content takes time and effort.
Find the Gaps
Even though you’ve put a lot of effort into researching your customers and competitors, don’t copy what they’re doing. try to find ways to make your content more original, effective, and powerful than anyone else’s.
Stage 4: Choosing Between Affiliate Programs and Networks
A larger scale affiliate marketing program is more suitable if you have a clear idea about your niche and strategy. Software as a Service (SaaS) affiliate programs have the potential to make more profit because the value of the software is higher. Supermetrics is an example of a SaaS affiliate program that gives you a recurring monthly commission for each license sold.
Stage 5: Keep Offering Unique Value
To stand out as an affiliate content marketing, ensure that your content is uniquely detailed. This could mean putting in extra effort to share original examples, experiments, and data. With most blogs rehashing the same old ideas, original content is bound to make you stand out. Be unique, generate traffic, and drive conversions by being the only one with certain details. You can achieve this by conducting extensive research, connecting with experts, or offering unique perspectives. For example, use free trials to test products before writing a review or comparison post. Any research relating to your topic will also make your content more original. Therefore, add details to your affiliate content to make it original and keep readers engaged.This will help you earn the most affiliate commission possible. Keep in mind that your goal is to turn visitors into customers, not just get a lot of people to visit your site.
One of the biggest challenges for marketers is creating a content strategy that resonates with their audience. It’s important to keep in mind your target audience’s needs and preferences when crafting content, so that your marketing efforts are successful.
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