Discover how to become an affiliate marketer and explore the numerous benefits and future opportunities that this career path offers, including financial independence, flexible working, and endless growth potential.
You wake up early each morning, get dressed, and go to work.
Doing this for 5, sometimes 6, days a week can easily get frustrating.
Each day you have to attend meetings, work with frustrating seniors, and work until you’re completely exhausted.
Maybe, you ‘re doing the job just to get paid, and have little to no interest in it.
Or maybe, you daydream about moving up the ladder soon. Yet, the competition is tough - so even this you can’t be sure of.
This is one of many factors in why people turn to affiliate marketing.
What’s Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based internet business where an affiliate marketer promotes a merchant’s product(s) or offer(s) to visitors for a commission. When the required action has been taken by the visitor, the affiliate marketer gets a commission.
Let’s say that the affiliate marketer is promoting a book. When the visitor follows the affiliate marketers unique affiliate link and purchases the book, a commission is paid to the affiliate marketer for the sale.
Lead generation is another action this also works for. Many clients or merchants need leads for a particular niche. In this case, the merchant would partner with an affiliate marketer to pay a commission on every lead sent to the merchant.
Affiliate marketing works on a revenue-sharing model, earning a commission when the required action has been completed. It’s easy to identify where the lead or sale originates from by the unique affiliate link, which is given to the affiliate by the merchant.
Why Affiliate Marketing?
There are several reasons why people venture into affiliate marketing. Some of the reasons which serve as advantages are:
A profitable Venture Affiliate marketing spending is projected to reach $6.8 billion by 2020, and $8 billion by 2022. This couples with the fact that 81% of brands leverage affiliate marketing to reach new customers and make more sales.
More people are starting to trust online reviews and blogs. In fact, 81% of United States online users see blogs as trusted sources of information.
What this means is that there is a higher chance of scaling with affiliate marketing as more people are not only willing to read, but also trust the information provided from blogs.
With this, more people follow through with the affiliate offers for products that you’ve suggested on your blog. Fortunately, there are a lot of products to choose from, and you can decide on which offer will bring you the most ROI.
Work from Anywhere
Having to work in the office is one big reason why many people hate the 9 - 5 lifestyle. They don’t have the option to work from home or the flexibility to work from anywhere in the world.
A lot of people prefer the digital nomad lifestyle. Who doesn’t want to travel around Europe or Australia, and still make money while doing it?
This is very possible with affiliate marketing. You can work anywhere in the world with only a computer and internet connection. Many digital nomads own affiliate marketing blogs. They write about their experiences while at the same time promoting affiliate offers.
Do you want to take the day off work? It’s your call. Requesting time off in advance and tracking down HR for permission are a thing of the past.
Flexible Working Hours
You don’t have to work 9 - 5 like everybody else. If you choose, you can work from 2 am to 7 am, take a break, resume at noon, and end the day’s work by 3 pm.
That means you can attend any event you want to without asking for permission from anybody.
Your goal is to ensure that you get traffic, and that the traffic you get is of high quality as well as is converting. You can choose to write articles, create videos, and create content at any time you please.
Since you’re not bound by any workplace schedules, meetings, conferences, or any other official events - you have your independence.
You still get up to work, but at your own pace. There is no boss pressuring you to meet deadlines, and no co-workers slowing you down.
Merchant Provides all the Marketing Kits
You don’t have to worry about creating resources, as the merchant provides you with banners, display pictures, or videos about the product. All you may need to do is copy the code and paste it. This requires very little knowledge of HTML and CSS - and is nothing you can’t handle.
Performance-based
Everyone loves getting what they are due. When you work hard for something, you want to get what is due to you.. Affiliate marketing gives you just that.
Your earnings are not based on a cadre, your earnings are based on how you, and only you, perform.
If you can get high-quality traffic, that converts well, with good content - your affiliate earnings will increase. Basically, your earnings depend on the work you put in.
For the best results, you need to invest in traffic sources and study the metrics. You want to know which content is pulling the most traffic, GEO, click-through rates, conversion rates, CPA, and others.
You may not start earning big at the beginning, but with time, effort, good content, and experience, you will know what works and what doesn’t.
Top affiliate marketers have put in a lot of work over the years. They are where they are, not because of promotion, but by putting in hard work.
Doing what You Love
You give your best when you’re doing something you love.
Let’s say you love flowers and like to blog about it, but you’ve got to work a data analyst job at an office to get paid. It’s a paycheck, but you’re miserable.
Affiliate marketing turns the situation in your favor. You can keep blogging about flowers and promote affiliate products related to horticulture.
You get to do what you love and you get paid for it through affiliate offers. There are so many brands using affiliate marketing to get their products out. Thus, there is no scarcity of products. The options are truly endless.
More so, there is hardly any product that you can’t get on Amazon. Which means you can promote products from Amazon as well as other merchants.
You can do more research on flowers and make it into your full-time job. You can even travel to discover more exotic flowers native to some rare places in the world.
The Future for Affiliate Marketing
Living in a digital world, affiliate marketing can only get bigger. More people are shifting towards e-commerce, their trust in blogs getting stronger and stronger.
Even though you don’t need a blog to become an affiliate marketer, you do need traffic and internet traffic is quite big.
There are 4.33 billion active internet users, all looking for information on different things. You can easily find where you fit in within a niche you love.
A lot of trends evolve in affiliate marketing. You’ll need to pay attention to these. For instance, video content attracts more traffic than text content. In turn, you’ll find that performance video contents sell more affiliate products than basic textual content.
Social media brings a lot of affiliate traffic, allowing you to easily build a following around what you love with it.
As long as you pay attention to metrics, build a brand for yourself, and put in the work - there is a lot of money to be made in affiliate marketing. All of this at your own comfort, on your own time, and whatever place you choose.
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