What is Affiliate Marketing Program?
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.
Where is Affiliate Marketing Program?
There are many online platforms or empires with Affiliate Marketing Program including selling technology stuffs, cosmetics, ebook, IT solution, etc. Among them, 3 top popular ones are Clickbank, Amazon, and CJ. Into this business model more, you can realize that there are many other businesses providing you tools like that.
How to start an Affiliate Marketing Program?
If you're new to affiliate marketing, the idea of earning commissions for promoting other people's products can be both exciting and confusing. How do you know how much you'll earn? How is the sale tracked and reported? When will you get paid for the sales you've driven?
Understanding Commissions first. I get ClickBank as an example. Here's a simple overview of how ClickBank commissions work:
1. You need to register an Affiliate account in Clickbank
2. You find a product to promote and create a customized HopLink.
3. You promote the product online.
4. A customer clicks on your HopLink, goes to the vendor's website, and ends up purchasing the product.
5. The customer purchases the product from ClickBank and you receive credit for promoting the sale.
6. Your commission is calculated based on the net sale price (see below) and credited to your account within two minutes of the sale.
How Commissions Are Calculated and Reported?
Every ClickBank product has a commission rate that is set by the vendor, ranging from 1% to 75%. When you drive a sale to that product, ClickBank processes the sale, applies its charges, then calculates the commission rate based on the remaining net sale amount. Here's an example of how much you'll earn on a one-time purchase product with a 55% commission rate:
- Retail Price: $29.95
- Subtract 7.5% + $1: -$3.25
- Net Sale Amount: $26.70
- 55% of Remainder: $14.69
Therefore, as the referring affiliate for this sale, you would earn $14.69.
Commissions for recurring billing products are slightly different. See Promoting Recurring Billing Products for details.
The maximum commission you can earn on a single sale is $150.
Getting Paid
Obviously, the goal of being an affiliate is to get paid for your efforts. To receive your first commission payment, there are two requirements:
1. You must reach your payment threshold, which you set in your Settings.
2. You must meet the Customer Distribution Requirement.
Once you've met these two requirements, you can start receiving payments. For more details about ClickBank's payment schedule see Paychecks.
4 Steps to Affiliate Success
There are many ways to be successful as an affiliate, but this article lays out the process that we have found to be the most reliable and sustainable while still being very inexpensive. Many affiliates try to skip steps 2 & 3 and go straight from picking a product to immediately promoting it. This makes it really difficult to succeed, and doesn't set up your business for success, so make sure to implement the steps in the order they're listed here.
Step 1: Choose Your Niche
I share strategies and tips for picking a niche for your new affiliate business in the previous article here - How to choose a niche. Please take a look at it again and be sure to spend plenty of time on this step! Don't rush it when getting started.
Before starting a business, you should assess your own ability to do so. Consider your own skill sets to determine what, exactly, you are good enough at to do professionally. What area are you most knowledgable, experienced, and skilled in? You need to be able to compete against existing businesses.
Next, analyze your interests. What would you do if money weren't important? You need to love whatever it is that you're doing, or your business will not be successful.
Then remember that consumers buy products and services to satisfy a physical or emotional need or solve their current problems. So your online business product or service must stimulate and then fulfill that need before a sale occurs.
Step 2: Build Your Platform
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