“What is affiliate marketing and why your project needs professional affiliates to sell more” by Elena Garrido from Reviews

As entrepreneurs and future businessmen, if we have to worry about something for our business to prosper and move forward, it is sales. Obviously, these will be a cluster of other important aspects such as having a good product and providing good service to our customers so that they always want more, but they should not stop caring for that. 

How many businesses have you seen that have a good product and service but fail because they fail at marketing and sales?

We all know many examples. The good news is that the world of marketing is super wide and within it there are many proposals that we can apply while being more affordable in terms of resources and knowledge.

Today I am going to talk to you about one of them and for which you do not need great technical knowledge or financial investment.

Normally this way of doing marketing is usually used in already validated products although I have seen some exceptions.

And come this far you will ask yourself: what is this about?

Well, imagine that there were people who wanted to invest in your product to make it known for you with the aim of earning extra money for recommending it.

This thing that seems too good to be true exists and it is exactly what we are going to talk about in depth today.

What is affiliate marketing and what is a professional affiliate

Affiliate marketing could be defined as digital recommendation or word of mouth.

It is a type of results marketing , that is, a marketing that is only paid when it generates sales for us. Once we have managed to sell, for each sale you make, we pay a commission or a small percentage of each one of them to the person who has generated it.

In this case, the person who has generated it receives the name of affiliate and it is about those people who receive income in the form of commissions for promoting products or services that are not theirs.

Within the affiliates there are two types: those who do it professionally and those who do not.

non-professional affiliates

Those who are not professionals can be family members, acquaintances or fans of our product or service, but who are not famous or projects that have a lot of traffic and see affiliation as a way to monetize that traffic and generate another source of income. Another typical example is authority blogs that have many visits or influencers that use this way to monetize their communities.

professional affiliates

On the other hand, there are professional affiliates who are people who live solely on commissions for promoting products that are not theirs. To get to this point, it is usually necessary for them to dominate all areas of marketing: copywriting, strategy, buying network traffic, analytics and SEO writing. They are people who usually open web pages that they monetize through positioning articles in Google or through advertisements directly to sales systems that the business has already created.

In short, affiliate marketing is a very interesting win-win strategy for any project. On the one hand, affiliates take a commission and generate income without having anything of their own and you get a “free” promotion and sales without increasing your cost structure.

The steps to take to implement an affiliate system and find affiliates for your project

At this point, you may be wondering: where do we start to implement this?

Well, in this section we are going to take a series of steps so that you can have a guide that tells you where to start, although to learn how to do it consistently, the ideal is that you train in it through Internet tutorials, mentors or online courses.

Step 1. Have a payment gateway or technology that allows you to create an affiliate system.

This step is essential and obvious. To do this, I am going to recommend different tools according to your type of business.

Infoproducts or training

To sell info products, mentoring or online teaching, I recommend Hotmart. The tool is free and you only take a commission for each sale.

physical products

To sell physical products through ecommerce, I recommend you search the Shopify store because there are several plugins and it depends on what you are willing to pay. If for whatever reason you do not have your store built in Shopify and it is in WordPress , the plugin that I recommend is Affiliate Manager , which has a free version. For online stores built on other software you should look for plugins.

Services or others

To sell services or others, I recommend the Thrive Cart payment gateway if you can invest. This platform has a fairly high single payment but it is worth it because not only does it have affiliates but it also allows you to carry out many sales strategies such as discounts and include extra products in the cart. If you prefer not to invest, I recommend Affiliate Manager.

Step 2. Determine the conditions of the affiliation: commission percentage, duration of cookies and type of affiliation, sales methods, etc.

Once you are at this point, it is time to specify what are the rules involved in being an affiliate of your product. 

One of them is the commission price because this will make people move more or less to promote your product. Its figure will depend a lot on your margins, since you will have to look for it to always be profitable for you.

Another important rule for affiliates would be the duration of the cookies and the type of affiliation . This will depend on both the platform you use and the rules you want to set. 

In case you don’t know, the cookie is that piece of code that allows us to award the sale to the affiliate. This is why it is so important to incentivize affiliates. For example, at Hotmart the cookie lasts up to 6 months and at Amazon it lasts only 24 hours.

On the other hand, when we talk about the type of affiliation, there are many such as, for example, first click to sale (when someone clicks on the link and ends up buying even if it comes through other affiliates later, the commission goes to the first one), last click to sale (when someone clicks on the link and ends up buying even though they entered at the beginning through other affiliates, the commission goes to the last one) or even pay per click (you pay the affiliate for the number of visits that it brings you). 

Finally, it should be noted that you must make it clear how your affiliates can sell. This refers both to methods (ads, banners, articles and reviews, word of mouth, etc.) and within those types of sales that are allowed and prohibited (what they can mention, what not, that they cannot advertise on behalf of the brand, etc.).

Step 3. Find affiliates and provide your affiliate link to each one.

To find affiliates you can use influencers or authority websites where you can advertise. You can do the search manually or through platforms looking for the same audience you want to reach. You can also offer it to your customers.

Lastly, you will also be able to look for professional affiliates, although normally these are more focused on the sale of info products because they leave commissions with higher margins, which gives them space to invest in advertising and develop more expensive strategies.

Once you have them, you will only have to give a personalized link to each one so that when they bring traffic, the cookie is placed and the commission is attributed.

Step 4. Track affiliates and motivate them.

In this last point, we will only have to do the daily management of the affiliates . This means responding to their requests, helping them sell by providing what they need, and motivating them. In this case, there are businesses that gamify affiliate systems by making rankings or giving prizes to those who sell the most to motivate promotion much more.

How to train in affiliate marketing and explore a little more on this topic

Coming to the end of this article, which I hope has been useful to you, I am going to recommend some courses where you can delve deeper into this world of affiliation.

For this, if I can recommend someone who knows what he is talking about, that is Javier Elices . Since approximately 2005 he has been dedicating himself to affiliation, being one of the pioneers in Spain and managing to live entirely from it through passive income.

The links will take you to a review of their training but before accessing it you will be able to access a free training that will help you get a fairly broad idea with which to work.

Pro Affiliate: discover the profession of professional affiliate through a free training that begins next June 28. In it you will discover how these types of affiliates work.
Monetize your passion: discover how to create and build a website that generates passive income thanks to affiliation . Here you will see how authority blogs do it to live off membership.