Affiliate Marketing Meaning: What Is It? [Explanation]
What is the meaning of affiliate marketing? For content creators, affiliate marketing is a way to build a business for themselves based on their passion. For advertisers, this is a way to advertise without the risk of false promises. Read on to learn everything …
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What is the meaning of affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing means that products are promoted, whereby rewards are only paid out when something has actually been sold. Advertisers are therefore not paid by the hour, but they receive a commission per item sold.
So payment is only made if there are results
The companies that use your affiliate services do not have to pay you money if your advertising activities do not generate sales or leads.
For this reason, affiliate marketing is also sometimes referred to as ‘performance based marketing’ . You only get paid when you have actually delivered results .
How does affiliate marketing work?
As an affiliate marketer you use, for example, your own review website, comparison site or affiliate webshop. You place your personal affiliate links there so that it is tracked that you send traffic to other companies. For example, you can earn money by writing reviews.
As an affiliate marketer you unburden other companies by helping them sell their products and services. You do this by sending your own traffic to their sales pages.
Why Affiliate Marketing? This allows you to earn money without the hassle
What are the benefits of affiliate marketing? There are quite a few:
- You do not have to make or purchase a product. This saves a lot of work. You only have to sell other people’s products.
- You don’t have to make good converting sales pages.
- You do not have to post a package after the sale to send the product to the customer.
- You don’t have to do customer service.
- You do not have to return products, with all the challenges that come with it.
- Your administration is much simpler than a ‘traditional’ company. You do not have an administrative aspect for, for example, the stocks and purchase value of the turnover.
- You don’t have to build perfect trust. The more people trust a certain webshop, the sooner they will buy. Everyone trusts Bol.com and Amazon, for example. You can take advantage of this trust by sending traffic to these reliable web shops, after which there is a high chance that something will be sold.
- You can do your work anywhere you can bring your laptop and where there is internet. So you can also become a digital nomad where you can work online and travel at the same time.
You only have to do one thing: generate traffic . And that is not a boring job at all if your subject is your hobby. So you can literally earn money with your hobby.
Affiliate marketing experiences are therefore always positive because it has almost no disadvantages. The only people who are not positive about it are the affiliate marketers who have not yet managed to generate a lot of traffic. These are often the people who think they can make money easily.
How Much Can You Earn With Affiliate Marketing?
Building affiliate marketing takes a long time, but once you have built it, you can grow endlessly in terms of income. It will usually take half a year before you can order your first pizza with the first five euros you have earned through affiliate marketing, but a few years later it has already become a full income.
Can you also start affiliate marketing without a website?
You can also do affiliate marketing without a website. You can use your social media, email list, or YouTube channel to help sell affiliate products from other companies.
Affiliate marketing opportunities and networks
The great thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to do the technical stuff. Special programs and networks have been created where you can create an account and your affiliate links will automatically roll out. You can register with various affiliate programs in every country.
- Clickbank is ideal for online products, like e-courses and e-books.
- Awin (you use this to log in to Zanox & Affilinet) is also a gigantic network with thousands of affiliated companies.
Experiences about affiliate marketing
Most people who start as an affiliate marketer drop out within a year. This is not exclusively the case with affiliate marketing, but this generally happens with business.
It requires a lot of time and work, just like all other types of businesses. Still, most of the affiliate marketing experiences are good , although most of the affiliate marketers you speak to make only a few hundred dollars a month.
The really big players have locked themselves up for two years and only worked on their business. Hardly anyone is willing to do this and therefore hardly anyone is really successful. The people who are willing to do this are now enjoying their results.
In any case, there will be many ups and downs. In addition, many people with a ‘normal job’ will tell you that it is impossible. This also applies to top athletes and top entrepreneurs. You have to be prepared for that if you really want to go for it.
This was the explanation of the meaning of affiliate marketing. Good luck!