Have you ever wondered what Affiliate Marketing is? How it works?
This is my first attempt to understand what is affiliate marketing.
Let me start with simple scenario:
I’m sure you must have visited and signup for hosting company in the past by following recommendation links from your other visited sites. Links with the URL /refer/, /recommend/, /out/, /go/, etc may contains affiliate links and hidden behind cloaked links.
Here is a sample link:
https://crunchify.com/refer/genesis. When you click on link it will redirect to
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=460184&u=528889&m=28169&urllink=&afftrack=
which is my affiliate link. This link is for WordPress Genesis Framework. When you signup using this link, I’ll get some 10% or 20% commission based on terms and conditions. Which is not bad at all. Idea here is to promote something related which your users love and get some commission out of it by selling related products.
So here is a definition:
Affiliate Marketing is a way of making money online whereby you as a publisher are benefitted or rewarded for helping a small/large businesses by promoting their products, services or site.
Commissions which you get by promoting products, services are mostly based on percent basis but it could be fixed price also.
Why Affiliate Marketing works well?
1st of all let me tell you my thoughts on Affiliate Marketing. I’ve been blogging since last 8 years and I’ve never thought of affiliate marketing in my initial few years. I strongly believe, blogging is something comes from your passion and interest, niche you believe in. If you help your readers in any way by providing quality contents or tips – that’s the big win for you.
Providing affiliate links should be OK but you need to be more careful. You should mainly focus on your quality contents on your blog. When and if required you should clearly mentioned about affiliate links in your post.
It is OK to put affiliate links in post but there should be some limit. Not all links should be affiliate links, which annoys your readers and you may lose your readers. You as a blogger couldn’t win without your reader's trust.
Does Affiliate Marketing works all the time?
NO. It doesn’t and I believe it depends. There are number of factors which affects your Affiliate Marketing strategy.
- Your blog’s traffic
- Your blog’s contents
- Niche of your blog
- Geo Location
- Find quality product
Sometimes it also hurts if you don’t find quality products and services. It also hurts your brand and reputation. So be careful and do your research before you jump into Affiliate Marketing.
Final thoughts
On Crunchify.com we use very limited affiliate marketing strategy and promoting very few reputed brands which we use personally and daily.
Here are affiliate marketing links: WordPress Genesis Framework, MaxCDN Enterprise. Which you could see in the footer section too. Determine what is your blog niche and promote only those related affiliate which you think works best for your readers.
In the future we will publish PRO affiliate marketing tutorials which will help you get started in professional way.