Monetising - Affiliate Marketing

So I could probably say it was my specialist subject if I had to choose one . But in this episode I'm going to just cover what affiliate marketing is , how it works and how it may or may not work for you in monetising your website . So what is affiliate marketing ?

Well , essentially all it is is you promote somebody else's product and if you drive a customer to the person who's product you're promoting and they purchase , you'll then get a commission in return .

So the great advantage for you here is that you don't have to produce a product . You don't have to build a product . You don't have to hold inventory . If it's a physical product , you don't have to deal with customer service .

All you have to do is promote that product and drive clicks to the person selling the product and then benefit from any sales that drive through . Let's cover over what some of the different parts of an affiliate marketing relationship are and you can see how the whole works together . So the first part is what we call the merchant .

The merchant is the company or person whose brand you are going to promote . So it could be Amazon , it could be the merchant , or it could be any other e-commerce store . It could be a software as a service product , like keywords people use . We have an affiliate program . We act as the merchant .

People can promote keywords people use and get a commission in return . It could be any other kind of digital product . It's whoever's got something to sell and he wants to work with affiliates to help drive traffic towards them . That's the merchant . On the other side of the relationship is the affiliate marketer .

That's , if you're listening to this and you're looking to become an affiliate marketer , that will be you . It will be you that is creating content on your website and driving clicks towards the merchant . And you'll have that relationship where , if any clicks you send , you'll get paid for in return for any sales .

You might not only send traffic from a website , you might also send from emails . You've got a newsletter list , an email list you can send people from . You can drive traffic via newsletter or even by phone calls . When , on broadband at Kodiuk we had deals with some of the broadband providers where we displayed a telephone number .

If anyone called that number , that was tracked , they knew that that call had been driven from our website and any sales that came from that we could also get compensated for . But in the main , most traffic will come from clicks from your website to the merchant's website . So that's how we'll think about it here .

The next person to think about is the consumer . This is actually the person who you want to attract to your website , who you want to inform and educate and help them make a decision on which merchant to then go and purchase with .

So ultimately , you need to think about the consumer , because without the consumer , you're not got anyone to promote to and no one to potentially sell to .

So it's really important to think about how you interact with the consumer on the site , and we'll talk a bit more a bit about how to things to think about to make sure that you maximize how you work with the consumer together and they need .

The final part of the equation is one that isn't in every affiliate relationship , but you'll find them in most , and especially if you're working with a big company . An affiliate network acts as an intermediary between the affiliate marketer and the merchant and will do services such as verifying that clicks are being sent through . They'll verify that sales are made .

They'll have software on the merchant's site so they can verify that transaction has been made , because in some cases , where people sometimes are on their own affiliate programs , they've been cases where people said they're not , was that honest , or don't pay out , whereas you know if you've got an affiliate network , they act as like an independent arbiter between you

and the merchant . They also can act as a marketplace with a huge database of a merchant who are looking to acquire affiliates , and they will also sign up affiliates , verify affiliates , do lots of the legals so that the relationship is properly protected between the affiliate and the merchant . So they do provide a purpose .

We find them very good to work with over the years . I mean some examples commission junction , partner eyes , impact . You know all these are all now big multinational companies and , yeah , they're very well to work with . That said , from the merchant side , they can be quite expensive for merchants because they have to have to pay , not just the affiliate .

They obviously pay fees to the affiliate network as well . You'll commonly find that smaller companies will use their own in-house software or off the shirt , off the peg software that they've bought , for example . The key was people use . We use a system called reward full for managing affiliates and tracking sales and for organizing payouts .

The real benefit to you as an affiliate for working through an affiliate network is that once you're accepted by the affiliate network , they have this huge database of merchants that you can look to choose to work with . Now , quite often the merchants themselves will still want to VETU and you have to apply for many of them to be accepted .

But as long as you've got a good site , that's not normally a problem . But the great thing is obviously the affiliate network . Once you're in there , you can search our database . It can help you decide what products to promote and which niches to go into . So , yeah , it's really really good and I would encourage you to sign up with a few .

Just see what's on their databases and what kind of products you can look to promote and what the kind of commissions are that you might like to be getting on them . So now we know all the different parts , all the different people and companies involved in an affiliate marketing relationship .

One of the next common questions I get asked is how much do you earn per sale ? What's the commission ? Well , I have to say it really varies a lot .

So , for example , if you are selling a very high ticket item , an item that's , for example , with broadband when we sold on broadband at credit UK because people are selling for broadband they're selling it for a recurring subscription contract that in many cases last year people don't leave for years .

The lifetime value of the customer to the merchant is really really high so therefore they pay really high commissions . So you can get one off payments from 50 to 100 , to even 200 pounds , depending on the product that people get . Yeah , so for things like that can be really high .

But for other products say an e-commerce store that's working on a product that's got very low margins for them you might only get 1% . Amazon Associates , for example , is a very well-known marketing program where you can sign up with Amazon to promote their products and they can .

Some of their products are very low percentages , so it can really come very sometimes payouts can be just a few pence , a few cents for a sale , whereas in other cases , with high ticket items , they can be three figures and in some cases on really big purchases , even four figures . So it really depends .

So that's what you've got to think about when you're trying to decide what to promote . Just bear in mind what the kind of commissions you're going to get back on .

So , for example , yeah , some of the real high ticket ones , yeah , they may pay out a lot , but it may take a lot of work and maybe far fewer sales , whereas if you're pushing something like Amazon , amazon convert really well . So sending traffic to Amazon might convert at a much higher rate , but we'll get a much lower commission rate .

But yeah , so if , unfortunately , yeah , it just varies a lot . Now , if you want to see a affiliate site in action , then I'll just talk through broadbandcouk , which is the affiliate site that I ran from 2004 to 2021 , when we sold it in a big exit to one of our competitors . Now , how did we attract people ? How do we convert them ?

How do we send them on to become sales ? Well , we essentially created an authority site on broadband in the UK and we created a database of broadband providers and the deals that they provide .

We built tools such as the broadband speed test to so people could test their broadband connection to check what speeds are getting to check it was what they were being they were actually paying for .

There is a built-in postcode checker where people can put in their postcode and find out exactly what broadband suppliers and what broadband technologies are available in their area to help them narrow down when they're trying to choose a new supplier . We built lots of guides to answer people's questions .

Pretty much any question on broadband you could have we would hope to cover . We covered the news , so we had broadband news that we covered .

So the idea was we wanted to answer all the questions that anyone could have about broadband in the UK , answer them for them and help them on their purchase journey , to help them decide which broadband provider to choose and obviously encourage them to visit those providers and then , if they subsequently signed up , then we earn our commissions .

And now there's a lot in there and I know that for beginners , some of the tools and things we built were you know that's a slightly higher concept now which is hard to do that most people are comfortable with , but you've got to remember it all starts going back to answering people's questions . So that's what you've got to do with your content .

So whatever it is that you're deciding to promote , whatever merchants you're working with . You've got to look to answer all the questions that people might have around that product or product group in full , because a merchant isn't necessarily going to cover all that in detail . A merchant isn't going to necessarily provide contrast between different products .

You've got to know advantages in affiliate that you don't have to follow a company line , you don't have to promote just one product . You can promote a range and you can look at the pros and cons in depth , and that's what you need to do on a good affiliate site .

In my experience , the very best affiliate sites are those which act as a consumer champion , so you don't overhyper merchant . You show the pros and cons between them and really act on their side . They're the ones that A you'll naturally get more backlinks .

No one's going to backlink to a site which is just purely obviously promoting just one merchant without really covering the pros and cons .

This is where I'm going to give a small plug to keywordspeopletousecom , because that was born out of my experience as an affiliate , always wanting to be able to find the questions people are asking about anything online , because that was how we drew in all our traffic by answering everyone's questions and we needed to find all those questions .

So that's why a tool so just keywordspeopletousecom which completely is dedicated to finding the questions that people ask online , can really help you when you're looking to promote a product , to tease out those questions that you just don't think of yourself .

You can't come up with all the questions that anyone's going to ask on a particular product or niche just by yourself . It's absolutely impossible . But if you go to a tool like ours , we can help you find so many questions so that you can cover any niche or products in such depth and much greater depth than the merchant does .

You've got to answer questions better than the merchants , otherwise Google's just going to send the traffic straight to the merchants . You need to be that resource in the middle that's worth Google sending traffic to , because you can just answer all those questions and become that authority for people .

Okay , so let's step through the process of how you become an affiliate marketer for a particular merchant . So first of all , you've either got to pick a niche or , if you've got an existing website , you've already got a niche . Once you've got that , you need to sign up with an affiliate network .

In most cases , that's been my first starting point , unless you've got a very specific partner . You know merchant that you want to partner with who run their own program .

So , for example , if you want to become an affiliate for Keywords People Use , there's an affiliate link at the bottom of KeywordsPeopleUsecom where you can sign up to be an affiliate with us directly . But for most , in most cases , you're going to want to go through an affiliate network . You then sign up with them .

Once they've verified you and you've got your account , you can then search for the merchants that fit your niche . You apply to them , they accept you

and then , once you're accepted , you can then generate affiliate links on the affiliate network . So that's basically where you go to them and say I want to link to this product or this page and they'll give you an affiliate link . That is that's what actually does the tracking for you . So it won't necessarily always go straight to the merchant .

It will go through some tracking links first . So the user visiting clicking that link , they're not really going to see any different They'll , they'll . It'll just go from your site to the merchant but as it hops over it will put in tracking cookies or beacons and those kind of things so that so that it can be flagged that that person has come from your site .

So if they sign up or purchase , they will . That's how we'll get attributed to you and you will get paid your commission . The affiliate networks will provide you with reporting screens analytics so you can see how many clicks you're sending to them a day , how they're converting , what commissions you're earning .

Commissioners tend to go through various stages , so , for example , they always start with pending and then you have to wait till the actual purchase goes through , and especially in things with subscription businesses , like with broadband , you would find that people would sign up for a broadband connection but then they might cancel before it's installed or they might fail

a credit check . So it sometimes takes a while for the actual sale to be confirmed . Depends on the product that you're selling and then , after a period of time , they will start paying out for your commissions . It will depend on how quickly the merchant pays the affiliate network to how quickly you get paid , and you will .

Normally , with most affiliate networks and most affiliate merchants , you have to reach a certain level of payments Sometimes it's around about $50 , that kind of thing before they actually start sending you payments , because nowadays usually by bank transfer or PayPal .

Back in the day it used to be checks , but I've not seen a check being sent out for many , many , many years now . The other affiliate program that I should mention , because it's quite a popular one and because it's so easy to get onto , is the Amazon affiliate program . That's where you go directly to Amazon .

If you go down to the bottom of the web page you'll see a affiliate sign up link . You sign up there . You can generate affiliate links for Amazon . They will pay you , like the rest , but they don't have their own affiliate network . They just work directly with their own in-house system .

But they are trustworthy and so the barrage entry is low , but again , the payouts are low . On that it's low percentages one to 10% depending on the product category you're selling . So it's a good starting point for people , but you will find there's also lots of other people promoting the same product , so it can become quite crowded to try and rank .

For some of the areas that they're reviewing . Amazon is the everything store , so there is huge depth there to pick places to promote . But really I would strongly suggest that the main thing is that you know your niche first and use expert knowledge that if you've got or you can build up in that area to become , as I said before , the consumer champion .

Don't be too overly commercial . You want to give people pros and cons . You want to be impartial . That's how to be successful . So that's my brain dump affiliate experience that I tried to get in under 20 minutes .

I will cover more topics on affiliate marketing in detail in future podcast episodes , such as how to produce a good bit of affiliate content , those kind of things but I just wanted to give a real overview in this episode so that you've got the key bits of knowledge you need to start if you want to become an affiliate marketer . Thanks for listening .

I really appreciate it . Please subscribe , share . It really helps . Seo is not that hard . It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusedcom , the solution to finding the questions people ask online . See where thousands of people use it every day . Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusedcom . If you want to get in touch , have any questions , I'd love to hear from you .

I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter where you can email me at podcasts at keywordspeopleusedcom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard .