What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does it Work?

You’ve probably seen countless youtube videos or come across websites by people, some probably way younger than you, claiming they’re making millions online without hardly lifting a finger, and how you can too!
Whilst those videos and websites may be way too farfetched in their grandiose bragging about making money online, the reality is, affiliate marketing’s one of the best paths anyone can take to start making money online by promoting other people’s products.

What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does it Work?

Affiliate marketing is a form of internet marketing where companies (sometimes referred to as merchants, ie amazon, walmart) or vendors, ie clickbank, jvzoo etc (more on these later) pay you (the affiliate) a commission for referring someone to their platforms/websites to purchase a product etc. through your affiliate link.

How Much Does it Cost to Join An Affiliate Program?

Free ninety nine!
You read it right, it costs you NOTHING to join an affiliate program to promote products such as on Amazon or from other merchants and vendors.

If any affiliate program charges you money to promote their products.. RUN!

Amazon’s affiliate program, dubbed Amazon Associates – (very fancy!) pays you up to 12% in commissions for promoting their wares (that’s products offered for sale BTW, Erhm!)

You simply send someone to Amazon through your affiliate link, they purchase anything within a given period of time, usually 24 hours – yes, you heard that right, they don’t have to purchase what you’re promoting! As long as they purchase ANYTHING on amazon within a 24 hour period after having clicked on your link, you get KaChing – paid!

Now, you may be wondering, why would companies such as amazon etc pay YOU for directing someone to their website when they could easily do that themselves?
Simple logic my dear Watson, amazon doesn’t have to pay to advertise whatever product you might be promoting, your product review is ample advertising for them.
You and 1000s of other affiliates promoting various products are actively driving traffic to merchants’ websites, so you can see how easy it is for the vendor or merchant to pay you a commission in the end should your affiliate links result in sales.

How Can You Make Money Online?
As you can see, affiliate marketing’s a fantastic way to earn money because you literally only have to focus on one thing – promoting.

Everything else is done for you. You don’t need to deal with customer support, sales, refunds or anything like that. All you need to do is refer people visiting your website or social media channel to the vendor or merchant’s website whose products or services you would be promoting.

In fact, you literally don’t even need to talk to anybody at all.

You just send people to the merchant’s websites & get paid whenever they make a purchase.

The best part is that there’s literally no limit to the amount of money that you can earn with affiliate marketing – The harder you work, the more bank you stand to make.

The potential is literally unlimited.

Some affiliates earn as much as 5-figures per month!

Now, before you start seeing dollar signs, lemme preface that by mentioning that at least 99% of affiliates who attempt to make money online end up failing – dismally!

How?.. I hear you ask.
Well.. more on that later but, if you feel you’re in a hurry to make some money because the debt collector’s literally about to kick in your door, simply click here for a Complete Plug & Play Affiliate Marketing Solution that’ll help you get started on the right foot with internet marketing!

Now, if you thought it was only only amazon or other retailers that have affiliate programs, you’d be dead wrong. There’s a whole world of digital download affiliate programs out there.

Wha’sat, I hear you ask?

Digital downloads, as the name implies, is any material that you can download off the internet in the form of a ebook, ecourse, video content etc.
Instead of promoting physical ecommerce products such as with amazon, you can make money selling digital products such as ebooks, think “How to lose weight”, “How to get your ex back”, “How to play piano by ear” or even better – “How to Make Money Online – even if you are broke” etc.. you get the picture!

Clickity wha.. Clickbank, What is That?

Clickbank’s the Bees Knees of the Affiliate marketing world, it’s literally the Robinhood for Internet marketers! er.., not the one from Nottingham mind you, but the trading app that every noob attempting their luck on the stock exchange flocks to.

Every new affiliate marketer’s path will go through Clickbank one way or the other!

Why is that?

That’s because Clickbank started off exclusively as a market place for digital downloads and one could argue that these are way easier to sell and distribute than physical goods.
Started off in 1998 in San Diego SoCal, the platform has been around literally since the internet was still wearing diapers!
Boasting more than 6 Million vendors and affiliates combined to date, Clickbank vendors currently offer both physical and digital download products to their affiliates to promote.
So, not only are you able to choose digital download products to make money off of, you can do cross-sells with two physical or a mix of digital download and physical products in the same niche. Or you can create several product reviews to promote different products and niches!

If you’re wondering, do digital downloads make you money?

Um, yeah’ya Bitchies!

..but you have to know what you’re doing, it’s not a get rich quick scheme, even though some shady affiliate marketers will try to sell you lemings covered in sleek sales copy to make you hand over your money faster than you can say Ermahgerd! Hence my earlier statement about 99% of new affiliates failing at even starting!

You see, most of the information you read online now is just total garbage and it falls into two categories. The info is either old and no longer works or it is just plain theory that hasn’t been tested.

It gets me angry that people are wasting hard earned money on untested ideas in the slight hope things will work out.

The cold truth is that… It Won’t!

Most of the so call systems the guru’s push you are don’t work.
However…

There is some good news!

You see… I’ve been right where you are… No success, in debt and working like crazy trying to make this ‘internet thing’ work.

For years I failed dismally at affiliate marketing. I bought every new course that was launched online, tried some of the strategies promoted in some of the courses I purchased to no avail!

It was horrible – and I had a new born baby at the time!
To say I have been on both sides of the affiliate marketing equation’s an understatement!

It hurts!

It makes you doubt your abilities – watching youtubers young enough to be your kids showing off their flashy toys, traveling business or first class to anywhere on planet Earth! Meanwhile, I was spending countless hours producing $0 days – for months!

Now you’re lucky because I didn’t have anyone willing to mentor me as you can today… It took countless hours of wasting my time on the ‘gurus’ systems to figure out it wouldn’t work and then hundreds of hours developing my own profitable system that could be repeated again and again.

Digital downloads are a Multi-Billion Dollar industry and there’re no signs this industry will taper down any time soon.
Fact, some clickbank super affiliates, such as Adam Horwitz, creator of Clickbank University 2.0, an online Masterclass that teaches you all you need to know about creating your very own info-product to successfully promoting it on the Clickbank marketplace ect, even had the opportunity to be invited to the White House during Obama’s Presidency for the Young Entrepreneurs Awards!

How to Make Money With Clickbank

To explain the ins and out of how to make money with clickbank deserves an entire blogpost in and itself, but since we’re discussing what is affiliate marketing here’s the condensed version.

Unlike many affiliate programs, most Clickbank offers come with a pretty nice percentage in commissions, starting from 30% to a whopping 65% per sale!
This alone makes Clickbank products more profitable and a good incentive for affiliates to promote.

First things first however, you have to sign up to Clickbank!

After that, you must complete your ClickBank profile.  This is mandatory as it proves that you are here for genuine business purposes.

At the bottom of your profile section, you will find a “Let’s Optimize Your Performance” section that asks you about the purpose of signing up on ClickBank. Here are the given choices –

• Sell physical products
• Sell digital products
• Promote products as an affiliate
• Promote products as an influencer
• Do market research

Choose the one that suits your purpose. You are also required to tell them about your annual revenue. Since you are just starting out, you can choose the $0 – $25K option.

After signing up, you will be required to choose a nickname – one that will be used with every affiliate link you will use to promote affiliate products. I’d advise to choose an easy, alpha numeric nickname that can be confused with the entire affiliate URL. The reason for this is there are savvy users out there who tend to delete your referral link before buying any products they find online. Having a alpha numeric nickname could make the entire affiliate URL look generic, like there’s no referral ID attached to it.

Just a thought.

How to Find the Best Clickbank Products to Promote

You might be surprised, but over 78% of new affiliate marketers do not spend the time to understand the metrics within the Clickbank marketplace! Every product on promotion on clickbank has its own metrics that show you how well other affiliates are performing promoting that product.

Before we delve into that, here’re some Clickbank terminology you’d be wise to understand:

• Offer – This is usually the product you have selected to promote within the Clickbank market place. Some offers have funnels, but sof the sake of brevity, let’s stick to you being paid for the initial offer you may have signed up to promote.
• Affiliate Page – This is a page where the vendor mentions all the details about his product or offer etc.
• Affiliate Support Contact – A way for you to get in touch with the vendor of the product/offer you’re about to promote.
• Initial $/sale – This amount you’re likely to make on successfully selling the offer!
• Avg $/sale – The average commission you’ll earn should you successfully manage to make a sale.
• Avg %/sale – The average commission percentage set by the vendor for his offer.
• Avg Rebill Total – This metric is applicable only for products with recurring billing cycle. It tells you about the average commission earned by an affiliate from the recurring billing of his affiliate sales.
• Avg %/Rebill – Just like Avg %/sale this metric indicates the average commission percentage offered by the vendor but for the recurring billing of his products or offer.
• Gravity– Roughly the total number of affiliates that have managed to successfully promote the product or offer and earned a commission.
• Cat – It is a short form of the word Category and it resembles the category of the offer or products.

Don’t let the above terms confuse you. Most affiliates usually choose a product to promote based on the Gravity of a product! A higher gravity metric usually means there’s more affiliates that have successfully promoted and sold the product.

The opposite’s also true for products with a low Gravity! At times a low gravity could simply imply that the product’s new on the Clickbank marketplace and hasn’t found enough traction from affiliates to have a high gravity.

That said..

• The three best-seller categories on clickbank of products to promote are:
  • • Health
    • Wealth
    • Relationships

    Within each category we can find smaller, focused areas of people’s needs.
    These focused areas we call ‘niches’.

    For example:
    In Health: ‘get rid of acne’ is a niche.
    In Relationships: ‘get your ex back’ is a niche.
    In Wealth: ‘make money online as an affiliate’ is a niche.

    Want to know where the biggest amount of money is spent?

    It’s the last one – ‘Make Money Online’ (MMO)

    That’s right.

    So it makes sense to promote make money online as an affiliate programs as it is also the theme of this blog post

    Nothing’s ever cast in stone though, all really depends on your affinity with the product you would like to promote and what channels you will utilize to promote such product!
    You could have a following of fans who’re into basket weaving under water and you may have found a similar product to cross sell to them for all I care!
    So there’s no reason to shy away from a offer, simply because it has a low gravity! Should you have a method of successfully promoting such product, have at it!

    Now, you may be wondering – What is this Clickbank Marketplace I keep harping on about?

    The Clickbank Marketplace is a complex list of markets where vendors provide information about the products they offer. As a vendor or product creator, your offer will classified according to the market related to the niche you’re in.
    For instance, products relating to weight loss, exercise etc would be placed under the Health Market (category), Dating related content would be classified under Self Help, Make Money Online Content would be classified under eBusiness & eMarketing and so forth.

    As an affiliate, you can search the marketplace to find out more about particular products and vendors—including their available promotional materials and sales statistics

    

     

    Now you may probably be wondering, why would a product creator or vendor PAY YOU a commission to promote their products? Shouldn’t they promote it themselves and pocket 100% of the proceeds?

    Sharing is caring my friends.. rather that doing all the hard work themselves, vendors are more than happy to have someone promote their product/s whilst they give you a commission (sometimes up to 75%) for your effort!
    Heck, they’ve probably spent a lot of money creating their course material for their market etc and, by “sharing” the proceeds of the sale in the form of a commission, they’re still going home with something whilst they have 100s of affiliates promoting their product!

    So it’s a super Win-Win situation!

    As for promoting these affiliate products, in some cases you don’t even need to have a website, consider youtubers for instance, the youtube platform, or any other social media platform, would do.
    That being said, social media platforms are fine only as far as you’re an established influencer with a large following or know a thing or two about SEO to rank your properties on those platforms.

     

    How to Earn Money from email Marketing

    For those of you who’re just starting out or desiring to promote affiliate products without a social media influence, do not lose hope, the most common method of promoting affiliate products is through your own website where you have the unique opportunity of capturing your visitors’ emails to build trust and promote affiliate products via email marketing!

    Now ask yourself, just how often do you check your email every day?
    Now imagine it was your email filled with valuable information that your visitors were checking, then clicking on your affiliate link at the end of that email?

    Just how much money do you think you could make on a daily basis with a large email list?

    Benefits of Building an email List

    Why build a list?
    This is the biggest age-old question most new affiliate marketers ask me..
    “Why do I have to build a list? Can’t I send prospects directly to the sales page?”
    Thing is, I’m as allergic to prolonged work as you probably are but, if you don’t build a list, you’re literally throwing money down the drain.

    You see –

    • 65% of visitors leave your page in first 15 seconds.
    • 70% don’t buy from you if you are not offering something more compelling than your competition.
    • 90% do not even engage with your page.

    It might be they don’t buy for a variety of reasons – maybe they spilled coffee on their keyboard, the dog chased the cat in the house, whatever, the Mom in-law called in unannounced – whatever!

    Trust is a big issue – maybe they really do need the product but got cold feet.

    Whatever the reason is, if you haven’t captured their email address, chances are you’ll never, ever see these people again.
    Which is a shame because, if you can show them why this product is exactly what they need, they’ll buy it later.

    Once you’ve got them as a subscriber on your list, you can message them to remind them all about the product and what they are missing.

    But, if you don’t have their email address, how are you going to do that?

    I’ve found that on average, it can take as long as 7 email follow-ups before some people come to their senses and buy.
    By building a list of prospects you can increase that 1% buyer conversion to more like 10% or 20%!

    So, you can see why the benefits of building an email list far outweigh starting out with affiliate marketing without capturing your prospects’ email addresses.
    Plus, of course, you can also offer them other products which will help them.
    And that means making further commissions down the line.

    That my friends, is how super affiliates make four figures – every day!.

    As you can tell, email marketing’s absolutely essential to the success of your internet marketing career.
    One of the best way to collecting emails is by enticing your visitors with an ethical bribe such as a free digital download whose contents are congruent with what you’re promoting or a discount voucher for their first purchase in exchange for their email addresses.
    Doesn’t matter what this ethical bribe is, what’s important is that you offer something of value to your visitors, just in case they leave without clicking on your affiliate links to purchase whatever you would be promoting.

    This is the condensed version of clickbank as well as how to make money through email marketing!

    So, next time someone asks you what is affiliate marketing and how does it work? you know exactly how to sound professional in internet and affiliate marketing speak, don’t ya?
    You will also be pleased to note that this approach is without a doubt the most profitable method should you decide to become serious with your internet marketing business.

    

    Want to know something fascinating?

    There’s never been a better time than now to get started with internet marketing because Covid-19 has already ended a lot of businesses, and a lot more in the next few years!

    More people than ever are now working from home and using the internet more and more.
    As people stay at home more, internet searches for digital downloads as well as physical goods increases.. it’s just common sense!

    So, if you’re in the internet marketing space and searching for ways to make money online, do some research that shows you what’s trending online for that specific search period, it’s only logical to write a review, blog post or video walkthrough that supports the trend.
    For instance, when the entire world was in pandemic mode, a lot of affiliate marketers made a killing selling masks, inhome exercise equipment, ergonomic chairs (for inhome office spaces), upper back correction braces (people slouching over their pcs and getting upper back pain) etc.

    As you can see, Affiliate marketing’s a very lucrative way of making money online, simply because you don’t have to do any of the grunt work of creating the product or service. The only thing that you have to do is provide the visitors and traffic to someone else’s website and then they do the rest.

    Imagine being able to close affiliate sales while you sleep, and get up in the morning to see the commissions you earned?
    That, in a nutshell, is what affiliate marketing’s all about!

    Being a good affiliate marketer means being able to see opportunity where others don’t!
    Just because someone’s selling or promoting a product you believe you could also make a killing in, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t because you feel the market’s saturated!
    Find a great angle to position yourself, or write an amazingly banging product review outlining the pros and cons of the product! Heck, hire a copy writer off fivver if you must! Great sales copy sells, and you want to start off with a bang!

    Stand up and Stand Out!

    There are multiple ways to promote your product and ensure internet traffic (eyeballs) see your product.
    The short end is:

    • Pinterest
    • Youtube
    • Twitter (search for trending hashtags in your product offering and write question related tweets designed to get answers and eyeballs)
    • Facebook
    • SEO (Search Engine Optimization is about manipulating your content online to be found based on keywords people are typing online searching for your offer!)
    • PPC – paying for ads online to be found faster! The idea here is you want to pay $X upfront for ads, and get $X+Y in the backend. If your page review’s not converting at at least 1% (1 person per every 100 visiting) you need to modify the content to make sure it converts!

    For Real Though, What is Affiliate Marketing and How does it Work?

    If this all sounds like too much hardwork, it really isn’t – it’s about being honest with your target audience – the same way I am being honest with you right now!

    This is serious!

    To succeed with Internet Marketing you need to be honest with your audience. Just because you smell some money with a product you want to promote, but deep down you know it’s a scam, don’t promote it!
    I am more than willing to share my successes and failures.. after all, my credibility’s at stake here!

    Close to failure, my biggest fear is leading those who put their trust in me astray, and ending up being labelled a CON!

    Trust me, no one ever wants to be called a CON.

    Ready to take your Affiliate Marketing to the next level?

    I really hope that you enjoyed this blog post on what is affiliate marketing and how does it work and that it provided you with enough insight to start your own internet marketing business.
    The truth is, becoming  a successful internet marketer isn’t really that difficult – the hardest part is finding the willpower (and less distractions) to stick with it.The reason most people fail is simply because they either give up or don’t put as much time & effort into writing their review posts and promoting them.

    That, in a nutshell, is all you’ve got to do!

    ..and this method works for everyone, even if you..

    • • Are a complete beginner
      • Have never made single affiliate commission before
      • you don’t have technical skills
      • have bought countless make money online course before and have nothing to show for it
      • Don’t want to spend countless hours in front of your computer
      • Don’t have huge startup capital to pay for ads

    So let me help you become a successful internet marketer!
    You’ve read this far, so how about getting your hands on the exact blueprint that I’m using on daily basis to generate more than $200 per day?

    Here’s the deal..

    Should everything I’ve shared in this blog post still sound daunting, yet you still desire to pursure internet marketing as your path to financial freedom, I have “a ethical bribe” for you.
    If you sign up to my course on Internet Marketing for Complete Beginners.. I promise to make it my mission to help you succeed!
    As a success course, not only will you get access to my private skype contact details, but I will personally coach you, via email and monthly skype calls, to your first $200 a day week.. after which I believe you’ll have sprouted your own wings and able to fly solo!

    Sound good?

    ..to your imminent success!