Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. It involves promoting products or services and earning a commission when viewers make a purchase (or whatever the desired action is) by clicking through your referral link. Basically, instead of selling your own stuff online, you sell or promote someone else's business or products and get paid for it. There are basically four steps involved in affiliate marketing:

1. Seek out a product to promote
   
2. Sign up for the affiliate program
   
3. Get a link to use for the product that tracks the people who click it
   
4. Get a commission when purchases are made through that link.
   

Affiliate marketing is usually used on a blog, website, email list or other online platform where you have an audience. Blogs with a high readership are an especially effective place to start doing affiliate marketing because the links get viewed by more people. Then you partner with a company, i.e. become their affiliate, in order to recommend their products to your audience. You can do this by writing posts about it, linking to their products in your text, including it in an email newsletter, discussing it in a post on social media, etc. Wherever you do it, you always use the special affiliate link which tracks all sales back to you.

After a certain period of time or when you hit a certain earnings mark, the company you've partnered with issues a payout to you. Sounds pretty simple, right? It can be a great way to make easy, passive income - but there are a few things to keep in mind before you get started.

Affiliate Software

Affiliate programs can be very lucrative but they do require some time and effort to promote and manage. Affiliate marketing tracking software can help you keep track of your affiliate marketing programs. The programs usually fall into one of the following categories:

• CPC (Cost per click): This is when you get paid when a user clicks on your link, regardless of whether they purchase anything.
  
• CPA (Cost per acquisition): This is when the advertiser pays for any specified action - such as an impression, form submit, etc.
  
• CPS (Cost per sale): As the name implies, this is a model where you get paid when an actual sale is made through your link. Typically the payment for this model is a little higher because it results in an end sale.
  

Affiliate marketing software can take care of all of the needs you have in tracking your affiliate programs. Here are a few great examples.

Cake

CAKE is a complete management tool that helps you track and optimize affiliate networks in one easy-to-use dashboard. You can see how well your program is performing overall or on different platforms, manage your contacts and analyze results in order to ensure you're getting the most leverage out of them. It also offers multiple payout formats, individual portals for your affiliates, referral rewards and more. There is a three-tiered pricing structure so you can choose the right plan for your needs.

HasOffers

HasOffers affiliate tracking software by Tune is one of the leaders in the industry. It has a completely scalable system so you can easily expand it to meet the needs of your business. It allows you an unlimited amount of affiliates so the sky is the limit! Plus, you can use it as an ad agency to promote your e-commerce store. Sign up for a 30-day free trial to test it out before you commit to a plan.

OmniStar

OmniStar is one of the longest-running affiliate software. It offers a simple and accessible dashboard that is super easy to set up so you can hit the ground running. It is very versatile and can integrate with any payment system or shopping cart and offers souped-up SEO and social media interconnectivity in order to connect you with new affiliates and customers. It's priced on the low end of available software.

Affiliate marketing success stories

Many people are skeptical of how affiliate marketing can actually make them money. But it can! Check out some of these awesome success stories.

Darren Rowse

Darren is the guy behind ProBlogger.net and he is known for being one of the most successful affiliate marketers in history. As of 2013, he has earned nearly half a million dollars as an Amazon affiliate marketer. Amazon commissions are small, but it's a highly trusted company and referral links work for everything that a user ends up buying when they click through your link - not just the product you're advertising. That means if you advertise a book and they end up adding a television and a bunch of video games to their cart, you get commission on it all. He had tremendous success with this program.

This Is Why I'm Broke

This Is Why I'm Broke is the name of a website that aggregates interesting and amusing products for people to peruse. The products run the gamut of price ranges and, as of 2014, it was making about $20,000 per month from Amazon affiliate sales - and this doesn't even count the money they were making from eBay and other sites. The site is super streamlined but features sharp images and carefully curated products.

David McSweeny

David McSweeny runs the site Top5SEO.co.uk. His blog went from making $0/month to making around $4,000/month in just six months. He put a lot of research into the content he was featuring, checking out online reviews and writing really deep reviews on his own site - sometimes as long as 2500 words. He boosted his site traffic to over 800 visitors in the first month. It goes to show how much initial work goes into creating a successful affiliate marketing program - but the payoff can be huge.

If you enjoy building sites, doing research and making money, affiliate marketing might be exactly the kind of thing you should get started with right away!