Any business needs growth and expansion. For example, if you own a factory, you will modernize production and install more machines. But what if you own an online store? Then the main task will be to increase the number of sales and find regular customers. To accomplish this, a system of affiliate programs was invented.
What is an affiliate program and what is its business model?
The main objective of the affiliate program is to bring a new client to the business. In exchange for this, a partner network participant receives a reward, which can be fixed, or depend on the transaction amount of the invited client.
An affiliate offer in this context is called an offer. The one who wants to find customers is the advertiser, and the one who attracts customers is the webmaster. Affiliates exist because they comply with the win-win principle, in which each side of the transaction wins - the advertiser receives sales, the webmaster receives a reward, and the affiliate network charges its commission on the transaction. Now you know what an affiliate program is. "And how to make money on it?" - a logical question will sound. We will give the answer for the role of the webmaster in this process.
Types of Affiliate Programs for Earnings
The main task of a webmaster in any affiliate network is to attract traffic, that is, visitors. But with the same traffic, the webmaster can receive radically different income, depending on how he monetizes it (sells it for money). This is due to the difference in the types of payment for traffic. Here are the main ones:
- payment for the targeted transition (click on advertising);
- payment for an ad (often a promo video);
- payment for the purchase on the target site;
- registration in the system;
- application installation, etc.
You can find out what type of partnership cooperation is suitable for your traffic channel only experimentally by testing various options for promotional materials, marketing strategies and advertising links (type of advertising - partnership offer). The best affiliate programs always reward their webmasters with bonuses and try to provide the maximum tools for work. But do not think that the personal manager in the affiliate program will do the work for you. After all, even the best affiliate programs can only direct the zeal of a webmaster in the right direction, but only their own efforts and constant work on errors will bring money.
Where to begin?
Webmasters who have just come into this business are looking for an affiliate program for beginners that would require them to have a minimum of knowledge and investment to start. One of these affiliates is Google AdSense. What is an AdSense affiliate program, you can understand instantly - it is on almost any informational website and is a network of contextual targeted advertising. In fairness, I must say that the Yandex.Direct affiliate network is also a contextual advertising system, but joining it is more difficult due to the strict moderation of the sites. But back to the topic of AdSense, because we are still interested in an affiliate program for beginners.
First of all, you need to register, and add your site to moderation, which will check it for compliance with the basic requirements, which are very easy to follow. The site should not violate the laws of your state, should not be spammed, contain viruses, etc.If you don’t have a website, you can create a blog in a few clicks using the services WordPress Blog, Blogger, Wix or in any convenient way, write several articles on the website and install adsense ads. Depending on the interests of the audience of your site (blog) and the subject of the resource, you can get from 1 cent to several dollars (!) In one click. It will be possible to withdraw funds by bank transfer, check or by any other means, but it is necessary after reaching the amount of $ 100 on the balance sheet.
How to get more traffic?
When you have already become accustomed to and studied what an affiliate program is, you will surely once be interested in a logical question - where to get traffic? After all, the more traffic - the more money you can get. The Internet is built on the exchange of information, therefore, if you own the information the user needs, it will go to your resource and bring money with your click on advertising. But not so simple. Let's look at the main ways to deliver your content to an audience or, looking from the other side, to convey your audience’s money to you.
Today, the main sources of traffic are:
- search engines - Yandex, Google, Mail.ru and so on;
- social networks (Vkontakte and Facebook know everything, but the social network is also YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Periscope, Twitch, Google + and others);
- mobile messengers (Telegram, Viber, Snepchat);
- bookmarks in the browser - oddly enough, if your site is good enough to use it regularly, you will get your backbone of regular visitors;
- e-mail newsletters;
- other ways.
The more virtuoso you come to building your traffic channels, the naturally you can reach a large audience.
Monetize traffic profitably
Earlier it was said that with the same number of visitors to your resource, the profit in terms of the visitor can vary by several orders of magnitude. This means that someone else can get the profit you have not received. How it works:
- Let's say person X installed an AdSense pay-per-click ad unit on his site.
- Another person Y registered on the website of the affiliate program of the online store, where they pay $ 20 for a perfect order.
- Y orders the ads of his affiliate link in AdSense, which will be shown on your site.
- Y gets a customer for the $ 15 store.
It turns out that the site owner - X could earn $ 5 more than with contextual advertising, but Y made that money. It seems obvious that if X used the store’s affiliate, he would have increased his profit, but this is not so. Indeed, in order to earn this extra $ 5, Y set up an advertising campaign in detail, conducted audience segmentation, tracked statistics and created promotional materials. In other words, it is a difficult and painstaking job. Such an activity is called traffic arbitrage, when you buy advertising traffic in one place and drive it to another, generating sales or orders, which arbitrageurs call lead.
Thus, if you are the owner of the content platform, sometimes it’s better to just use contextual advertising, because who knows whether it will turn out to be a plus relative to the initial earnings, by setting up advertising campaigns yourself.
Affiliate Traffic Arbitration
On the other hand, if you thoughtfully read the previous paragraph, you noticed that in fact, the arbitrator makes money out of nothing by simply setting up an advertising campaign so as to get the affiliate payout more than he spent on advertising.
For arbitrators there is a whole special network of affiliate programs with pay-per-action. Arbitration includes several stages, these include:
- Selection of offer.
- The choice of advertising channels.
- Preparation of promotional materials.
- Audience segmentation.
- RK setup.
- Analysis of statistics.
The last two points are repeated until the bundle of offers - promotional material - advertising channel becomes profitable, that is, they go out in plus.
Do affiliate programs require you to have your own website?
Do you really need a website? All popular affiliate programs allow you to use a wide selection of channels to attract traffic. Often limited to sites are only offers from well-known brands that manage their reputation and do not want to be advertised anywhere. For most other offers, you can use almost any tricks to get traffic - for example, mass like and follow-up on the Instagram social network among arbitrageurs as free methods of receiving traffic are now very popular. Affiliate programs also agree to receive traffic from doorways - spam sites that are filled with little or no sense content generated mostly automatically. Such methods are referred to as "gray" methods of receiving traffic (they often violate the rules of search engines or other systems), but it is better not to know about "black" ones at all - they are criminally punishable things, such as spam, virus software and so on.
But to the "white" include, for example, public on social networks, the YouTube channel, voluntarily issued e-mail subscriptions. Each of these categories creates a whole mini-industry, however, the word “mini” in this context means millions of dollars. But nothing motivates so much as millions of dollars, right?
I already want to choose an offer!
It is time to bring an up-to-date list of affiliate programs with which you can, should and should earn money:
- Shakes.pro is an offer aggregator with responsive support and a personal manager.
- Shakes.mobi - a network of affiliate programs for mobile offers.
We will include m1-shop.ru, kma.bi, cityads.com and others in the same list of top affiliate programs. Very often, offers in different affiliate programs are duplicated, and the webmaster has a good opportunity to choose the affiliate program that provides the largest contributions, or the most responsive technical support, and maybe payments without delays (which are called hold). If you seriously want to do arbitration, you will find a complete list of affiliate programs that have established themselves as effective.
To summarize
The market of affiliate programs seems very attractive, and their list is so diverse that it is difficult to choose where to start, because wherever you look, one offer is better than another. But do not rush to think that you thoroughly know what an affiliate program is, because in each individual case you run the risk of losing money by incorrectly setting up an advertising campaign, or not earning profit by changing the context to an affiliate program paying for leads, but this risk is also rewarded at times. After all, once you find a profitable bundle, you can squeeze it out as long as possible, making a profit, simply replenishing the advertising budget again - here, in the literal sense, money makes money. There is no need to be afraid to take the first step, but each step should be considered - there is no place for emotional decisions in arbitration, you need to believe the numbers, even if they contradict your picture of the world (for example, if statistics say that girls buy cars better, and boys buy better dolls - that means it is, the rest is just speculation). Earnings on affiliate programs is unlimited, especially if you feel the strength of arbitration on a foreign audience, because there the stakes are ten times larger. Study, work, and arbitration will bring you money.