THE COMMON TYPES OF AFFILIATE MARKETING CHANNELS

By Relebohile Kobeli – Digital Campaign Specialist

Hello there, if you are reading this article, chances are that your google search history has one or two or similar combinations of the following:

• How to make money online
• Best side hustles in 2020
• How to earn a passive income
• How to start an online business

There’s no need to be ashamed. “i-job i-job”, waking up at ungodly hours to drive through bumper to bumper traffic with other snoozing commuters. Reading through email after tranquilizing email until you knock off from work at 5 pm.

Too close to your reality?

What if I tell you the dream is not farfetched? That you can indeed make money while you sleep. From anywhere and at any time.

That’s the idea behind affiliate marketing. In this article, we are going to touch on what affiliate marketing is and what it takes to become a successful affiliate marketer. If this is a newfound concept for you, this article will help you get started. If you have been at it for a while, you will still find something in here that will take your business to greater heights. 

What is affiliate marketing

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is when an online merchant pays you a commission for sales generated or just traffic that originates from your referrals. Here is where you can learn more on what affiliate marketing is.

Now that we’ve covered what affiliate marketing is and how it works, let’s talk about the common types of affiliate marketing channels.

It is good practice in marketing to promote products and services using different channels. Doing this keeps your audience engaged and receptive to making a purchase and helps you reach them across the channels they prefer. In the same sense, most affiliates use multiple channels, but they do not all advertise products/services in the same way.

1. Influencers

You didn’t see it coming, did you? Think of the number of times you have been “influenced” to purchase a product or service. Influencers are affiliate marketers too, better yet they hold the power to impact peoples purchasing decisions. Their large following allows them to direct consumers to the seller’s products through various interactions such as blogs and social media posts. Once you and I have made the purchase, they then receive a percentage of the profits they helped to generate.

2. Bloggers

Did you know that blogs originally started as “weblogs”, this was a platform where people could write about their day-to-day activities? Their everyday tasks became silage to build small sites, and on these, they could share their stories, photos, opinions and videos. As these gained a following, then was the dawn of blogs, now more sophisticated and recognized for their merits.

Bloggers excel at growing a retailer’s conversions or sales, through their ability to rank organically in search engines queries. Bloggers trial the product or service and then write a detailed review that promotes the brand in a captivating way, driving the traffic back to the seller’s website using deeplinks.

Beyond helping the seller to improve sales, the blogger is awarded for his or her contribution in spreading the word about the products/services value.

3. Email lists

When last did you subscribe to a newsletter because you were reading a captivating article and couldn’t get full access to it unless you submit your email address? Yes, the “subscribe to my newsletter” pop up box. That is one of the ways marketers build an email list. Email marketing is one of the highly effective digital strategies of making a good buck in Affiliate marketing, the conversions rates are high, and it turns one-time buyers into loyal, raving fans.

You can build an emailing list to send promotional material of sellers’ products/services or you can create content driven newsletters that have hyperlinks to products and earn a commission once a purchase or an action has been fulfilled.

4. Large media websites

These sites focus on building an audience in millions and have, they designed to generate massive amounts of traffic, continuously. On these sites’ products are advertised to a large group of people by use of contextual affiliate links and banners. This method results in a top-notch revenue for the affiliate and the seller as it improves conversion rates and offers good exposure.

5. Paid search focused microsites

Affiliates can also generate a great amount of revenue through developing microsites. A microsite is a single cluster of pages or an individual web page that functions as a separate entity within an existing website. They lead to increased conversions by offering content that is focused, targeted to a specific audience and often make use of straightforward and simple call to actions. Microsites can have their own domain names or a subdomain.

Now that you know what channels you can pursue; below are tips and strategies you can use in 2020 to help you rock the affiliate marketing game.

Tips and Strategies to Help You Become A Successful Affiliate Marketer

1. Develop a rapport

First things first, start building a niche audience, a community of people that have very specific interests and likes. Focus on creating content and reviewing products and services that fall within your niche. By doing this, you can establish yourself as an expert in one area, leveraging trust with the people you are advertising to. This will allow you to tailor your affiliate campaigns to cater to the needs and wants of your audience, increasing your conversion rates.

2. Use several channels

Naturally, people consume content and prefer to be communicated with using different channels, these include blogs, emails, SMS and social media etc. Look into cross-channel communication to see which one your audience responds to and yields the most revenue.

3. Promote products and services from different merchants

Familiar with the saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? The same principle applies to affiliate marketing, promoting one merchants offering means that you will be stuck with their promotional material, their conversion rates and ultimately their commission. It is important to offer your audience a range of products within your niche as this helps diversify your commission portfolio and create a more steady income stream.

4. Testing and optimizing your conversions rates should be a religion

Let us do a quick exercise. If your promotion page currently has 6000 visits monthly, at a 2% conversion rate, you have a total of 120 sales. For you to drive 240 sales, you can either work on getting double the number of visits to your page or you can invest time in increasing conversion rates to 4%. This can be as simple as testing call-to-actions, optimizing the landing page and putting an optimization strategy in place.

5. Understand and focus on your affiliate traffic sources

To build a healthy and profitable affiliate marketing programme, you need to build the size of your audience. As such it is important to know the traffic sources and the profiles of the audience that visit your sites. Sources can include social media, email, display, organic and paid traffic, referral, as well as direct traffic. This information is made available to you in Google Analytics. On there, you will find information such as the times and days people visit your landing pages and the attrition rates, demographic information such as age, gender, geolocation and the devices they use to access your websites. All this data can help you make an informed decision on which traffic sources to invest in, ultimately increasing your conversion rates and boosting your revenue.

Like I said, escaping a 9-5 is not all that impossible. Affiliate marketing is a proven way you can make a passive income. Explore any one of the common Affiliate marketing channels and utilize the strategies recommended to start off your own programme. With commitment, drive and learnt skills it can be an effective way to achieve your income goals even as a primary career. Does this look like a viable alternative to you?

Affiliate.co.za Helps Affiliate Partners Monetize Their Online Traffic

Joining Aff_coza Partners is very simple and straightforward, you simply sign up FREE to our affiliate program by visiting http://affiliate.co.za/affiliates/ in order to start promoting our offers ranging from loans, insurance and e-commerce. Our Partner Acquisition executive reviews each application and approves them soon afterwards. We accept affiliate applications from any country and welcome traffic from all geographies.

Affiliates, you can join Affiliate.co.za program today FREE of charge here.

We have a variety of offers across all verticals lined up that your affiliate program can capitalize on with the right strategy. Make sure to register as an affiliate or login into your affiliate account to start working on your income goals.