The Internet has been the great equalizer, as far as the earning potential of an individual is concerned. Pre-Internet, entrepreneurs would have to set up shops in their hometowns, big or small, and try to make it using only the population around them as an income source. Now, millions, if not billions, of people can access your online presence, and that traffic can be monetized in some way.
The biggest hurdle for most online entrepreneurs is actually getting that online traffic and properly monetizing it. Youtube monetizes traffic by paying you per view. Google Adsense does the same. Others sell things they have acquired or created through their own storefronts or by being a middleman in a process referred to as dropshipping. Today’s article, however, will focus on the topic of affiliate marketing and why so many entrepreneurs have fallen in love with the program.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is rather simple, but highly effective. There are two parties in the affiliate marketing system: the affiliate marketer and the person or company doing the payout. In affiliate marketing, the goal of the affiliate marketer is to get people to the company’s storefront and make a purchase. Once a purchase has been made, a percentage of the sale is given to the affiliate marketer. For instance, a marketer places an Amazon link on their website to a pair of gloves. Should anyone click that link and continue to checkout, that marketer will receive 5-7% of the total sale.
This doesn’t necessarily have to apply to buying physical products. Some affiliate programs like CB passive income, reward the affiliate marketer every time someone signs up for an email list and follows through on purchasing a program. Essentially, any action that can be traced to traffic from an affiliate marketer’s site can be rewarded. Typically, these are tracked through browser cookies, and some affiliate programs will reward the affiliate marketer if the person signs up for the service up to 30 days after initially clicking the link.
Why Affiliate Marketing Is Simple and Easy
One thing any would-be affiliate marketer should notice is there’s no need to buy or store any physical products. You can effectively be “selling” hundreds of thousands of products, without actually having to have any of the products yourself or even have seen them in real life. You let the company that manufactures and sells the product deal with making the product, storing it, and eventually shipping it to the end consumer. Why would manufacturers give you extra money off the top they could be keeping for themselves? The answer is straightforward: companies would rather make 80-90% off of the sales you bring in as opposed to 100% off of the deals they don’t make. Nearly all products have some mark-up built into them already, and any with an affiliate program probably have their commissions built into the price as well. You’re essentially an extra wing of their advertising budget and get paid based on how many sales you can make.
Closing Remarks While it may seem simple, actually getting people to click through your links and make a purchase is the biggest hurdle to overcome. You’ll need to create a site that’s fast, thoroughly laid-out, and of course, trustworthy. Anyone can make a site and put it full of affiliate links, but getting people engaged with the content on your site and willing to whip out their credit cards resulting in you, making money, is a whole other story. If you think you got the chops for it, affiliate marketing can be a very lucrative practice.
About Carson Derrow
