What is affiliate marketing?
So... what exactly is affiliate marketing?
Well, affiliate marketing is not explicitly related to the internet, by definition it just means marketing someone else’s product or service and receiving commissions for that activity.
That’s it – in a nutshell, it’s promoting someone else’s product by some means.
It has been around since the dawn of products and the art of selling.
This affiliate marketing takes a lot of forms, for example:
- Running blogs and using SEO to grow their traffic, and then promoting other products via affiliate links in content and earning commissions
- An influencer who creates video content and promotes other people’s products/services, getting a commission on those sales (or a one off payment)
- Review sites that compare products then use Amazon affiliate links for each one, hoping to capture a commission on potential sales
- Running advertising on some display/banner ads to promote an app install via an affiliate network
- Being an Amway member and reselling their beauty products to local people
Affiliate marketing takes many forms as you can see.
However, the form most discussed in forums like this is paid media buying (purchasing ads) and promoting products and services available from affiliate networks.
This is purely digital and involves risking (investing) your own money on ad spend to promote some digital product/service.
It’s a lot more technical than most affiliate marketing, moves faster, and is attractive because it can scale fast IF conditions are correct.
A marketing campaign on Facebook for example could scale from $10 to $10,000 within a week if everything lined up correctly – which is never going to happen with SEO growth of blogs, in-person sales or a growing Instagram profile.
That being said, it’s not that simple or easy, but it’s the root of the attraction – anyone anywhere being able to make money sitting behind their computer, with little social interaction required and no CV or resume in the way.
You do however need time to work on it, a lot of patience, a mindset for growth, the grit to endure a lot of failure, and cash you can afford to lose on learning the ropes.
Along the way, paid media buying will hopefully teach you a lot of technical skills and give you enduring skills that can be leveraged in the future in any project you work on.
If you know how to get ads in front of people and sell something well, you will never be out of a job.
In the next article, I’ll go over the entities involved in basic (paid ads) affiliate marketing.
