What is Affiliate Marketing Business?

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. Affiliate marketing business refers to the marketing activities that the affiliates involve towards to the goal of generate revenue.

Millions of companies are eager to sell more products or services to more customers every day. Many of those companies are offering the affiliate programs to people who willing to help them sell more. Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to earn a commission by selling products or services offered by other companies. It’s a great way to supplement your income from the convenience of your own home.

You may already know many affiliate marketing business. The real estate agent is a perfect example of affiliate marketing business. Real estate agents list hundreds and thousands of properties on their websites. Most of the properties are not own or operated by the listing agents. Whenever a real estate agent closes a deal on a property, the particular real estate agent receives a certain percentage of commission based on the property sale price. The real estate agent is a very common type of affiliate marketing business around us, but it is not the only type of affiliate marketing business.

When it comes to online, the affiliate marketing business gets even more interesting. Blogging and interactive online communities have become the most common presentation of the affiliate marketing business. These platforms allow improved communication between merchants and affiliates. Web 2.0 platforms like WordPress have also opened affiliate marketing channels to personal bloggers, writers, and independent website owners. Contextual ads allow publishers with lower levels of web traffic to place affiliate ads on websites.

One great way to get paid a commission without appearing to sell anything is adding affiliate links within your website content. That way, when people click on the link, they’re taken to the company site and, if they buy, you’ll earn a commission.

For example, if you’re writing about decor that includes purple comforters, make the phrase “purple comforters” a link to Amazon’s site that shows people only comforters that are offered in purple. Your readers can browse through Amazon’s offerings and maybe purchase an item that they like.

Pay-per-Sale

Pay-per-Sale is an online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying sales. It is an online advertisement pricing system where the publisher or website owner is paid on the basis of the number of sales that are directly generated by an advertisement.

Pay-per-Click

Pay-per-Click is a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.

Pay-per-Lead

Pay-per-Lead is an online advertising payment model in which payment is based solely on qualifying leads. A lead is generally a signup involving contact information and perhaps some demographic information; it is typically a non-cash conversion event. A lead may consist of as little as an email address, or it may involve a detailed form covering multiple pages.

Pay-per-Call

Pay-per-Call is an advertising model in which the rate paid by the advertiser is determined by the number of telephone call charges by viewers of an ad. Pay Per Call providers charges per call, per impression or per conversion. It is similar to online pay per click (PPC) advertising but induces the viewer to make a telephone call instead of viewing an external website.

1. It Has Low Startup Costs

Unlike other startups, you don’t need to spend 6 months raising a large capital investment from investors or crowdsourcing.

In fact, in affiliate marketing, you only need to spend $3/month on hosting plus $7 for a domain in order to launch a website (sometimes you don’t even need a website!).

From then on, your only true costs are content (which you should be able to write yourself), choosing a nice CMS and website design (you can use WordPress, which is free) and then writing a blog to help generate traffic and sales to your site.

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Even once you start earning an income with your site, your overheads will still remain low. You don’t need to hire an expensive office to meet clients in, you don’t need to hire anyone to deal with customer support (like you would in an e-commerce venture) and you don’t have live with costs such as chargebacks and credit card fraud, and if you use accounting software such as Quickbooks.com then you don’t have to pay for an accountant either.

2. You Can Earn An Income Relatively Quickly

With affiliate marketing, you can literally start making money almost straight away.

If you work in niches such as gaming for instance, then you can earn $100-$500 for every customer you refer to a casino. You only need to refer a few customers every month to make $1,000.

Remember, you don’t need to provide any ongoing support or services to your referred customers. Once you’ve referred them, the operator/merchant will take care of the customer loyalty and upsell marketing campaigns.

You also have the freedom to choose and promote different operators in a given market. If you’re operating in a competitive market where operators are hungry for a listing on your website then you can even start to charge fixed-fee listings or distribute your own media pack. This also helps to automate the process of generating an income about your site.

3. You Can Make Millions From Affiliate Marketing

One of the misconceptions about affiliate marketing is that it’s only for small businesses. However, there are plenty of cases where affiliates have gone on to build multi-million-pound brands and ventures.

Mark Pearson launched MyVoucherCodes.co.uk in 2006 for example and sold it last month for £60 million. Mark, aged 27 at the time, set up the website linking to deals for different vendors. It was all set up as an affiliate marketing operation that quickly scaled into something incredibly successful.

There are many other cases of affiliates scaling their operations into million pound ventures such as Money.co.uk, OddsChecker.com, LatestCasinoBonuses.com (which recently acquired another site for $2.5 million) and the newer holiday booking sites such as Hotels.com and Booking.com.

One of the things that most of these sites have in common is that they jumped into an emerging niche early and focused on maximizing customer value to provide the best services possible. This is what helped establish themselves as industry-leading brands that created more growth.

One of the lessons to be learned here is to launch an affiliate marketing business in a high growth industry or one where you can add your own unique value to your visitors. This is what will help you scale your site quicker and reach that dream of retiring at 21.

4. It’s Easy To Scale An Affiliate Marketing Business

Many successful affiliate marketers have discovered that scaling their businesses into a white label, drop shipping or wholesale operations was not a terribly difficult task.

Launching a white label is incredibly easy to do. In niches such as Forex, Gaming, Finance, Insurance and App development, for example, you can launch your own white label brand in less than 2 weeks.

The advantages of starting your own white label are that you can increase your conversions by reducing traffic leakage as well as recruiting other affiliates to promote your brand on your behalf.

It also is very easy to scale an affiliate marketing site in eCommerce by venturing into drop shipping or wholesale.

5. Many Monetization Sources Available

Affiliate marketing lends itself really well to different marketing channels and sources of customer acquisition.

Some brands even let you advertise your affiliates links directly on media and PPC networks such as Facebook. This means you don’t even need your own website to start affiliate marketing.

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