I'm new! What's this "Affiliate Marketing" thing and how does it work? (19)
I'm new! What's this "Affiliate Marketing" thing and how does it work?
If you're new to Affiliate Marketing, you may well be finding everything a bit confusing. There are lots of terms people use, lots of complicated software, and it's easy to feel like you don't know where to start.
So here's a five-minute guide to the very basics of Affiliate Marketing!
The Make Money Online Business
There are thousands of ways to make money on the Internet.
But they all boil down to one simple formula:
(Thing To Sell + People Who Might Want It) * Telling The People About The Thing = $$$$$
So how do you find your thing to sell?
Well, you could create it yourself, of course. But that's a lot of hard work - and there's an easier way.
That easier way is what defines Affiliate Marketing.
Bounty Hunting For Fun And Profit
A lot of other people already have products they'd like to sell more of: from paid dating sites to mortgages to online games.
So they offer a "bounty" to anyone who can persuade people to buy them. If you can sell the things, then you get the bounty.
That's the basics of affiliate marketing.
Yes, we're basically bounty hunters.
But it gets better: a lot of the time, we don't even have to sell things.
We just find people who might buy the thing.
And Even Easier Than That...
Finding people who want to buy a product is hard. But f you can persuade someone to try a product for free, they're much more likely to buy it afterward.
Unfortunately, on the Internet, it's no longer very easy to persuade people to try things, even if they are free.
That's where we come in.
A lot of businesspeople are willing to pay a bounty for trial registrations - in other words, for getting people to sign up to a website for free.
That's known as "CPA" - Cash Per Action".
If you can make adverts that persuade people to sign up to a website that's paying a bounty like that, you can make a lot of money.
And that's just what we'll teach you to do.
Here's An Example Of How Affiliate Marketing (AM) Works:
Adam runs a dating website. He gets money from his users, but in order to grow his business, he needs new people to sign up all the time.
So he offers a free trial of the site.
But he still has to find potential users and persuade them to sign up. So he offers a "bounty". Anyone who can persuade a user to sign up gets $4.
Bernhard, the affiliate, hears about this, and thinks he can persuade people to sign up to that site.
But where's he getting the people from?
Well, that's where Chanin comes in. Chanin runs a massive, free social networking site. Because it's free, he sells advertising space to make money.
Bernhard buys advertising space from Chanin, creates some great adverts that attract the attention of Chanin's site's users, and sends people who click on those adverts to Adam's site. A fair number of those people sign up with Adam's site, and Adam pays Bernhard $4 every time someone signs up.
If it costs Bernhard less money to buy the advertising space than he make from people signing up to Adam's site, he's in profit!
The Numbers Behind Affiliate Marketing
First, you need people. A lot of people.
Affiliate marketing is a game of big numbers.
Generally, you can persuade somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the people who see an advert to click on it. From there, somewhere between 2% and 15% of those people will sign up for whatever it was advertising, if it's free.
(If it's not free, you'll see more like 0.5% to 2% of people signing up for it.)
That means that for every "conversion" (signup) that you get, you'll have shown your advert to between 700 and 50,000 people.
The "bounty" that you'll get paid for each conversion is about $5.
That means you need access to a whole lot of people.
Traffic Sources: Your Money Fountain
We call the places you find these people "traffic sources". There are many, many of them.
Some of the most common sources of traffic include:
- Running a big, successful website which you control and can put adverts on.
- Using Search Engine Optimisation techniques to get visitors from popular Google searches to a website you control.
- Paying the owner of a popular website to let you place ads on their site - anything from a popular blog to Facebook.
- Paying an "advertising network" to let you place ads on dozens of sites that they manage adverts for.
- Paying for ads in a mobile app or other software that's supported by advertising.
Generally, at Stack That Money, we focus on paying for ad space. There's a lot of it out there, it's surprisingly cheap a lot of the time - and if you can make more $$$ than you're spending for your traffic, you can scale up to huge incomes.
Examples of specific traffic sources we use include Facebook, which is quite restrictive but very profitable for people who master it, and the advertising agency Go2Mobi, which handles the mobile advertising space of hundreds of top sites across the Internet.
To learn more about traffic sources and which ones are best this year, read What's Working In 2015
How To Make A Profit From AM
So how do you make more than you spend? Well, that's where the skill comes in.
Affiliate Marketing is half-way between a science and an art.
The science part is testing. We test offers to see which ones get the most people to sign up, we test traffic sources to see which ones provide the most money, and of course we test ads to see which ones are the most persuasive.
The art part is persuasion: we think about what we're offering, we think about what our audience wants, and we try to bridge that gap. We come up with ways to present the offer, we find images that will entice people. Basically, we're Don Draper from Mad Men.
But most importantly: we don't just try one thing.
The secret of making money in affiliate marketing is this: try a lot of stuff.
You can never, ever predict what ad will work and what ad won't, or what offer will sell to what audience.
So the way to make serious $$$ is to keep testing.
We test, we experiment, and we record results.
Other guides in the Getting Started Guide tell you how to test, what to test, and how to try new approaches without jumping around at random.
And the good news is that if you keep testing, sooner or later, you will find massive...
What To Do Now
Go through this guide, and check that you're sure you understand the basics of how affiliate marketing works.
It can be handy to write out a quick summary for yourself of what you've learned.
If you have ANY questions or don't understand anything, post a reply below this post, and I'll jump in to clear things up for you!
Thanks for this information, but I have a couple questions:
1. Where can I find these businesspeople who ready to pay? As I understood these businesspeople are like CPA for us, so should I search CPA web-sites for affiliates?
2. If the answer to last part of 1st question will yes, can you recommend a web-sites?
@ted_tikoun - you can find the businesspeople who are looking to pay through things called "Affiliate Networks". They exist to bring affiliates and businesspeople together for mutual profit.
Here's a list of networks currently active on STM: http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...kype-Directory
So after finding a successful campaign, would you recommend dedicating a portion of your time and money testing unknown and undiscovered traffic sources?
@lloydmc - if you have a successful campaign, the first thing you should do is try and scale that as hard and fast as possible, as well as launching other campaigns with the same offer and traffic source. As part of that scaling, it's definitely worth testing new and unknown traffic sources, yes.
I need to know how to even begin a campaign (not niche picking)
@eneal45 - does https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...Can-I-Find-One answer your questions? If not, what specifically is blocking you on the launching a campaign front? Let us know and we'll get you going!
How important is ones lander page when it comes to overall profits? Right now im using a photography website as my lander but thinking I need to change that?
@big daddy l - your lander's arguably the biggest key to the entire thing (after a good offer and traffic source). Every campaign you do should have a lander dedicated to it and designed specifically for it, under most circumstances.
Hi! Thanks for the information.
But I am still confused because we do both CPA and CPL basis. But we are more focus on CPL.
What are the other things or the basics about CPL generation?
Originally Posted by kristinafaustino
Do you create multiple landers on one domain or a separate domain for each offer?
Multiple landers on one domain. You can run a lot of landers on the same domain, no need to register tons!
Originally Posted by caurmen
Just place each LP in a separate directroy so like www.domain.com/LP1/, www.domain.com/LP2/ OR use subdomains like LP1.domain.com, LP2.domain.com ... replace LP1, LP2 with something that matches the angle or vertical.
Personally, instead of using separate subdirectories, I go ahead and use correct subdomains under my main (TLD) domain just to have extra protection. Why I do this is (a bit off subject because affiliates use mostly paid traffic to offers) just a habit from my SEO background. Google usually will not ban a TLD for spammy backlinks into a subdomain of the TLD, they just ban the subdomain. For example, a Wordpress.com or Weebly site uses subdomains for it's user's accounts and Google wouldn't ban Wordpress.com or Weebly.com or Facebook.com for that matter because thousands of spam links goes to a user's subdomain account or page. Just my two cents, and it's just as easy to make subdomains on your hosting cpanel/server.
Originally Posted by richspalding
for running offers with facebook traffic, how important is your domain name?
Im just starting out, and registered the domain name "exploringpromos.com" to use as a launch pad to test landing pages and offers.
Do you think its better to have a relevant domain name when running ads on facebook?
I thought I had a good understanding but this post broke it down even further. Great stuff!
Originally Posted by bcollins506
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