Intro.

An affiliate partner program is your chance to earn commissions by promoting products or services of a company. As an affiliate marketer, your task is to sign up to affiliate programs to partner with them, to help these companies make sales.

For those with little knowledge of affiliate marketing and how it works, you’ll get a brief explanation in this article also. You won’t get a full understanding of an affiliate partner program, without knowing what an affiliate marketer does.

You may be searching for a new online opportunity, and affiliate marketing is a great choice to start earning. Affiliate marketing continues to thrive, even after some ‘guru’s’ suspected it would die out many years ago.

Did you know that over 80% of companies now run an affiliate program. This means that all these companies are looking for affiliate marketers to help promote their products or services online. Just think about that for a minute. Over 80% of companies! This is an enormous amount of online stores that YOU can leverage to earn money.

Here’s what you need to know from the start.

What is Affiliate Marketing

I’ve written several articles that explain the process of affiliate marketing, and why this is still a great opportunity. Although it’s not for everyone, anyone can learn how to become an affiliate marketer, even with zero experience.

As a brief explanation, here’s the affiliate marketing process in a nutshell.

1. Although it’s not necessary to own a website as an affiliate marketer, it’s certainly advised and recommended as a beginner. The majority of affiliate marketers will own their website.
2. You want to choose a topic for your website to write about. Known as a niche, it will have to accommodate the types of products you want to promote. For instance, you may want to sell cosmetics, so creating a website about ‘beauty’ would make sense.
3. Once you’ve created this site and written a few articles about your niche, it’s time to apply to companies (or merchants) affiliate partnership program. You may want to partner with Sephora, so you can head over to the Sephora website and find their affiliate program.
4. Once you’ve applied to become an affiliate partner, you’ll need to wait to be approved. If you have extremely little content on your blog, some affiliate partner programs will decline your application. This is why it’s a good idea to write at least 10-15 articles about your chosen subject before applying to any affiliate partner program.
5. After you’ve been approved, you’ll be provided with affiliate links, banners and other affiliate tools that can help you promote the merchants products.
6. It’s then up to you to connect these affiliate links to the products you’re promoting. This is a very simple process which can be learned in a matter of minutes. All affiliate partnership programs and affiliate networks will have tutorials on how to do this also.
7. So, you have a blog article on your website about Sephora bracelets, with affiliate links attached. When a visitor to your website clicks on a bracelet or text containing your affiliate link, they will be sent to the Sephora store to make a purchase.
8. Only if that visitor makes a purchase will you earn a commission. However, should that visitor make multiple purchases on that same visit (or in some cases future visits), you’ll earn commissions on all items they buy.

This is how affiliate marketing works and it’s a very successful and popular model of earning money. Some do it as a hobby for some side cash, others do it full time and make thousands of dollars per month.

Affiliate marketing is scalable, meaning you can work as little or as much as you like on your website. This will generally determine how much money you will make.

The Merchant / Selling Company

The merchant is the company or store that you (as an affiliate marketer) are partnering with. They have the products or services that you want to advertise or promote on your website. Without the merchant, there is no affiliate marketing.

Most people generally think of the merchant as being an online store like Walmart, Target, Amazon, toy stores, camping stores etc. And this is correct, that’s exactly what the merchant is.

But merchants can also sell services rather than physical products. Let’s say you want to create a building website that makes money via affiliate marketing. You can promote the labouring services that companies use.

The finance industry can also be leveraged in this way. Tax accountancy services can be advertised on your website or maybe debt reduction services like payday loans. What about shares and cryptocurrency services, these can all earn you commissions from promoting their service.

The other kind of product that can earn good money is selling digital products. There are many creators out there that have built their own online courses. As an example, Ben Cummings has a brilliant course called Search.Find.Buy., which teaches how to sell successfully on Amazon. Wealthy Affiliate teaches affiliate marketing and Ricky Hayes knows how to teach eCommerce dropshipping successfully.

So even though the promotion of physical products is a successful form of affiliate marketing, digital products and laboring services can also be a profitable route.

The Affiliate Marketer

You probably understand by now, what the role of the affiliate marketer is, but if you’ve just skipped to this section, here’s a brief explanation. The affiliate marketer is somebody that promotes products and/or services on behalf of merchant companies.

The affiliate marketer will earn commissions from sales they have initiated via their promotions. For instance, an affiliate marketer advertises a digital course on their website which is sold for $997. A visitor clicks on this course link, and is taken to the course owners website to sign up. If that visitor buys the course, the affiliate marketer will earn a commission for initiating the sale.

Commission percentages can vary depending on the course. I’ve sold a course that costs this exact amount of $997, and the commission percentage was 40%. So, my commission for this one sale was nearly $400. Not bad hey.

The Customer

Affiliate marketing is a win-win-win all around in most cases. I say most cases because there are some really poor affiliate marketers out there that just promote any new products that come on the market, regardless of what they think of the product. I don’t believe this is a win for everyone, especially the customer that buys the product.

However, in most cases affiliate marketing works well. The customer is obviously the person that buys the end product. This customer will initially visit your website because they either searched for a product in Google or other search engines, and landed on your product review.

They’ve read your review and decided to find out more. They click on your affiliate link and are taken to the merchant website to purchase the product you’ve advertised. They then (hopefully) buy the product.

So, the customer is happy because they’ve purchased the product that they were searching for, after reading a genuine review. You’re pleased because YOU will make a commission from the sale that has been made, and the merchant is also happy because they’ve made a sale that would never have come their way without your help.

The Affiliate Partner Program

Not all companies have an affiliate partner program, but as I stated at the beginning of this article, a huge percentage do. Many have their own affiliate partnership programs and many others decide to use an external affiliate network to help them run the affiliate program. I’ll talk about this shortly.

The affiliate partner program will give you all the necessary tools to help you promote the merchants products and services. You’ll be required to sign up, apply and be approved to access these tools. The features include tracking reports, links, banners, deep linking and many other tools, all designed to help you get more sales.

Some affiliate programs are better than others and the commission rates will vary. I’d encourage you to research the commission rates and cookie periods to begin with before signing up. The cookie period is the timeframe in which you will earn commission.

As an example, a 30 day cookie period is quite common. This means if a visitor comes back to the online store within a 30 day period and makes a purchase, you’ll still earn the commission.

The Affiliate Network

As opposed to an in-house affiliate program, many merchants decide to use an affiliate network to manage their affiliate partner program. You can see some of these affiliate networks by visiting this page, but there are also loads more.

Some of the best affiliate networks that I use are AWIN (who also own ShareSale now), FlexOffers, MoreNiche and Impact Radius.

It’s often a good idea to choose several affiliate networks to work with, but don’t choose too many. You’ll usually find hundreds of affiliate programs to apply to in each affiliate network, which is more than enough. All your earnings can then be managed within the one network.

If you sign up to 15 affiliate networks, you may feel a little overwhelmed if you make sales through them all.

Just like other affiliate programs, once you’re approved for any programs you apply to, you’ll have a suite of tools and features available to leverage.

The Potential Customer

This is anyone that visits your website. Getting website visitors is the hardest part of affiliate marketing, which is why it’s best to get educated in how to do this. So when you do get visitors, you want to give them the best experience possible so they buy from you.

Potential customers are everywhere. Everyone that searches for a product or service is a potential customer, and you want to harness them carefully. This is why you want to learn how to write good content and learn to write good product reviews.

I joined a platform that taught me all this and more, and I’m still an active member. You can read my review of this platform here, which will give you all the details required so you can make your own informed decision. It’s also free to sign up and check it out.

Final Thoughts

There’s a fair bit to learn to become a successful affiliate marketer, and I hope this article has given you some food for thought. You now should understand what an affiliate partner program entails, and why it’s necessary for merchants and affiliate marketers.

For more information on beginning your own affiliate marketing online website from scratch, read on below to get a handle on how I got started.