Are you an entrepreneur who is looking for another source of revenue? Are you ready to step up your freelancing game and start earning thousands of Rands more each year as an affiliate marketer?
According to Crowd 1, affiliate marketing is one of the oldest methods of making money for online marketers. Even before the internet started, and people called it affiliate marketing, you could offer discounts or rewards to people who sent their friends, family, or other interested parties to your business (hello, referrals!) The great thing is, you don’t have to deal with customer service or creating new product ideas.
Today, affiliate marketing has expanded into a multi-billion Rand industry on which marketers all over the world capitalize every day. Affiliate marketing is an arrangement between your website and a company whereby you direct potential customers towards their site.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
There are two different ways of generating profit from affiliate marketing: CPC (cost per click), or CPA (cost per acquisition).
Similar to ads, CPC is where you receive money every time someone clicks a link on your site that sends them to the affiliate (partner company).
With CPA, you don’t receive money unless that user actually ‘converts’ – i.e. buys a product or signs up to a service from the affiliate. As you’d expect, CPA fees are far higher than CPC, as you’re literally making the affiliate money – unlike CPC, where they may just browse.
Rather than simply providing ads to users as a sideshow, affiliate marketing can link neatly with your content. Today’s users are much more tolerant to this kind of marketing, and you’ll generally find it a much more lucrative option.
For example, you could have an affiliate relationship with Bennie’s Car Parts. If that were the case, it’s likely you’ll produce content about car parts, which contains unique links to Bennie’s Car Parts site.
These unique links are important. It’s how your affiliate can track that a customer purchase originally came from your website. These are known as affiliate links, and they’re actually pretty easy to create.
Naturally, the more traffic your website gets, the more traffic you can potentially redirect to an affiliate. In this respect, it’s a lot like selling ad space – you need to get a lot of site visitors in order for it to be a worthwhile revenue stream.
Sell Products that Deliver Value to the User
One of the mistakes many new affiliate marketers make when starting out is to sell anything and everything. You need to make sure the product you’re about to present to your audience is a product that will be valuable and helpful to your target market.
Remember, you have a reputation to uphold. And if any of these people are going to come back and buy from you again and again, you need to be the go-to source for recommending and selling the best products in your niche.
Providing value to the buyer is really the key. You don’t want a one-off sales strategy where you pick a product blindly and then pray to God (or spend money on A/B testing after the fact) it works. Take some time and research valuable products which will benefit your users.
For more information or if you would like to start a new venture with affiliate marketing, please visit Crowd 1. Partners of Crowd1 have the possibility to invest in the company and to integrate new members in their own streamline/downline into their own structure, to build a team and to earn serious money with Crowd1.
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