What is Affiliate Marketing

There are many forms of marketing and advertisement, one of the most effective ways to market your business, or help market other businesses is affiliate marketing. What is it? Affiliate marketing is an arrangement between a website and a user. The user earns a commission for advertising the website and using referral links to drive traffic to this website. Though it sounds simplistic, it has a little more depth to it than that.

Often confused to be the same thing as referral marketing, because of the third-party utilization to drive sales, there is one difference that sets these two apart into labels of their own. Affiliate marketing is purely financially motivated, whereas, referral marketing focuses more on personal relationships and trust. Throughout this article, we will be breaking down a couple of the more important details of affiliate marketing to help you better understand what it is.

The Way It Works

Though it may seem fairly simple to set up an affiliate marketing campaign, there is one major factor to consider, the way it works. The process of affiliate marketing is that the referer earns a commission on the sales that they help the merchant receive from the link on their site. The link that they use to make the referral has a special code embedded into it that is specific to the party making the referral that identifies them to the merchant in order for them to know who to give the commission to as long as a sale happens in a predetermined lot of time that is set by the merchant.

Passive Income via Affiliate Marketing

Many people find themselves asking whether or not you can make a passive income from affiliate marketing. The answer to this is a definite yes… and no. Because of the way this works, you only get a commission for the passive sales via the links that are used from your site to the merchant. Those needed clicks to gain the referral commission through sales shortly afterwards require years of hard work and brand recognition to build the suitable audience needed to make said clicks. Having multiple sites that you have developed and gained the audience for can all gain passive income, but you have to make sure you have the audience that will buy from those links, so they have to be relevant to what you are referring. Then there are the sites that require regular maintenance. The passive income received can cover only the maintenance vs. doing it yourself. Bottom line is, hard work will equal results, and results are not always equal to the hard work.

Finding affiliate marketing programs to promote can be challenging, and you must always make sure that what you are promoting is relevant to the viewing audience that you currently have or wanting to seek. Stay tuned for our article on how compelling content can help drive affiliate marketing campaigns. Let us know below what you think of affiliate marketing, and as always thanks for reading.