Affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable aspects of digital marketing. Unlike performance marketing that requires continuous investment of funds to get results, you front-load the expenditure for your marketing efforts and then receive a periodic supply of income.
Many people assume affiliate marketing is completely passive income. However, that is not true. Even affiliate marketing requires your time, effort and money. The difference is you don’t have to spend your money continuously to get an income.
Affiliate marketing is a term used to denote the practice of marketing or recommending the services or products of a third party seller to your audience and receiving a commission from the seller for your successful referrals. There are many networks that accept affiliate marketing partners. Amazon is one of the most widely used and easiest affiliate marketing platforms in the world.
Amazon Pays a Commission for all the Sales
The affiliate program of Amazon popularly known as Amazon Associates. The program pays you a commission for promoting the products on the Amazon platform. If you have a sizable audience that listens to your recommendations and makes a purchase decision, you are the influencer. When your audience makes a successful purchase, you receive a percentage of the referral fee that Amazon collects from the vendor. This can be anywhere from 0.5% to 10% of the advertising fee.
Amazon successfully tracks the sales generated through your efforts by providing a unique identifier for you. This is the affiliate link that associates a sale with your profile. Amazon periodically checks the purchases and deposits the commission in your bank account.
Find the Right Products and the Right Niche
As of everything in digital marketing, “the riches are in the niches”. So, it is important to choose the right niche of products that you can market. The commission rate of amazon depends on the product category and some of the products like baby products, consumer electronic goods, grocery, health and beauty care products all have a high commission of 5% or more.
Choosing the right category of products will ensure that you make more for every purchase. After choosing the right niche, you need to build an audience and be present on a platform to share your affiliate links from which your audience can buy the products.
You Need to Build an Audience
In order to build an audience, you can use a number of platforms and media. For instance, if you are a blogger, then you can write blog posts regarding the products and how useful they are in the day to day life. Or if you are good at creating vlogs, then you can start a YouTube channel and create videos around the products, how to use them, their advantages, and comparison with other products.
The important thing to note here is, you need to optimise your content and website for search engines. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO of your website is an important part of this process; it brings traffic, i.e., visitors to your website. These people, when they click on the affiliate link on your website, get diverted to the Amazon website, which will promptly track your unique link and allocate the sale to your account.
Similarly, you need to post your affiliate link to the product in the video description on YouTube. This will also drive traffic to the Amazon website and convert into a sale.
Other ways include creating a following on other social media such as Facebook and Instagram and then promoting the products on these platforms. Your followers will buy the same and you will earn a commission through these sales.
Content Marketing is Way Ahead for Affiliate Marketing
As you can see the affiliate marketing process is an elaborate and time consuming process and it should not be confused with completely passive income. You can either spend your time to create these digital assets that brings in a steady source of revenue or outsource these processes to some agency to create the content for your affiliate marketing.
Since the search engine and social media traffic are completely dependent on the algorithms of the respective platforms, it is also necessary to build an email marketing list. Once you have a considerable number of subscribers for your newsletter, you can directly send emails to your audience and drive traffic to Amazon.
Skills You Need to Develop to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer
In order to become a successful affiliate marketer you will have to learn all of the following and master at least one of them.
- Content Planning & Creation
- Content Writing
- Graphic Designing
- Website Development
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Video Creation & Editing
- Social Media Marketing
- eMail Marketing
- Content Marketing
If you are planning to kick-start your affiliate marketing career, then you can join the digital marketing course at Indras Academy. You can learn all of the above within three months and get certified by leading organisations. For demo classes and complete details about the course, book a consultation today.
