If you are a Marketing expert, Digital marketer, or a student, affiliate marketing is one of the very common platforms for anyone that doesn’t require any degree or any kind of specialization. It only requires a better understanding of the marketing system and skill. No matter if you are a school going student or about to join college. 

 

Passive income is one of the popular and very easy sources of income for any beginner or student. They can easily earn money while studying without making great efforts. Fresh minds are always capable of learning many new things easily and earn more. Affiliate marketing is the best work way to earn money. You can also read about our article on the best jobs for work from home for a broader perspective. 

However, it sounds cool and easy to earn passive income from affiliate marketing, but it is not. To achieve this you really need to have a strong grasp of all the basics of affiliate marketing which I have mentioned in this article.

 

No doubt it is one of the most common and worldwide passive sources of income for many individuals. And there are many strategies that are tested and tried and can be very useful for a student or newcomer to get started in the best way.

If you are a newbie or a student and looking for a comprehensive guide to affiliate marketing, Keep reading this article and you will understand all the terminologies and processes of affiliate marketing. First, we will cover all the terms and basics of affiliate marketing: what it is, why it is so good, how to do it, and so on.

Before we proceed further, let me make you familiar with some basics about affiliate marketing.

 

Affiliate marketing: What is it?

It is an advertising tactic. What happens during the process is that the seller, generally online, rewards an Internet site with a little share money for each referred client that arrives thanks to the promotions they make and finalize their purchase. This site is known as the affiliate. Here are the tips for working from home.

 

What are the requirements of affiliate marketing?

In Affiliate marketing Links plays a fundamental role, It is because apart from directing the traffic it also has a code that allows us to track visits to know:

• When its made
• If you really make the purchase or you took action as per need
• What website or campaign does this visit come from?

 

Who is involved in affiliate marketing?

• Affiliates: They are the owners or webmasters of the websites that allow them to host ads in their space in exchange for commissions. To be an affiliate, you need to have a website with a contracted domain and hosting and one of the best options would be to do it with WordPress.org to be able to install the ads function through a free plugin.
• Affiliate platforms. There are occasions when this figure exists and other times when it does not. They are intermediaries between advertisers and affiliates who offer affiliate programs, infrastructure, and software through which communication is generated, commission payment systems between advertisers and affiliates, etc.
• Advertisers.  They are brands that want to display and promote their products on the websites of others. Advertisers pay the commission agreed to the affiliates and the affiliate platform every time the links contribute to traffic or sales. If you have a brand it is also very interesting that you try this method of sale. It is usually very beneficial since you do not have to make a large disbursement since you will pay by the commission when sales or contacts have been generated. It is the best way to get others to recommend your product.
• Clients: The clients are the ones who make a purchase online. They are the ones who buy the product or send a form with their data and with this they guarantee the affiliate to earn a commission.

 

There are many affiliate programs that are available online i.e JVzoo Affiliate Program or Amazon associates through which you can register and join them to become an affiliate. But from a student point of view, it would be better you go for amazon associate program initially. After joining their affiliate program they will provide you with a unique ID and an affiliate link. 

 

With the help of that affiliate link, you can create your own promotional campaigns either from email marketing or on your landing page. Here email marketing would be a great strategy to choose.

Hence, it has the capability to reach a large number of audiences at a time. All this can be processed easily with SMTP servers that drive your email campaign smoothly. You can create an email onboarding series and send free emails and with the various Free SMTP servers available, send bulk emails to your target audiences and ask them to buy the following product with the link (Affiliate link) provided below.

 

The moment a visitor visits a site with your unique affiliate link a cookie is activated in their browser to track their activity. After this, each transaction that is considered an action, the seller is able to register it and attribute it as yours, that you are already part of its affiliate program. With this, they can proceed to make the corresponding payment.

An action is considered as such if it is a sale or submission of a form, to give an example of what brands consider to action under their terms of an affiliate program. Even with the whole process, you can also increase your email list by asking your customer to signup for newsletters after which you can acknowledge them with welcome emails using free autoresponders. In this way, you can achieve two goals in a single process.

 

Types of Remuneration in Affiliate marketing

Different events can be defined that will entitle the commission to be charged. Depending on the type of product or service that is marketed, one or other forms can be established, but the most common are:

• Payment for sale: It is a clear criterion by which to establish a commission. They are usually high returns but we depend on the advertiser's conversion capacity.
• Payment by Lead or by registration: In this case, if we get the user to go to the advertiser's website and register in a form, we have already achieved the event that entitles us to the commission.
• Payment for Call Tracking:  It is a widely used modality in some types of businesses, which consists of getting them to leave your phone requesting that they call you from the advertiser to inform you.
• Pay per share: In each type of advertising strategy, the advertiser may be interested in achieving different actions. For example, in the sale of insurance, there are affiliate programs in which the advertiser commissions if the affiliate gets a potential client to make an insurance quote in the insurer's "fee".

 

There may be other types of remuneration formulas, such as pay per click (CPC) or payment per thousand impressions (CPM).

 

Affiliate Marketing tactics you need to follow

For a beginner or Students here some of the useful and basic tactics you can follow, to begin with:

 

 

1. The importance of choosing the niche to work

 

Although it is far from the only way to approach it, it is usually very wise to choose a vertical sector, especially if the capture of traffic is going to be done through search engine optimization. But as we said, affiliate marketing can also work for horizontal markets.

When we choose niche or micro-niches, we must try to comply with the following:

• Sufficient market size:  If you are going to opt to capture traffic either Organically (SEO) or SEM, we must verify that search terms are used in this niche with enough volume to guarantee us traffic. You can use Google keyword planner for this.
• Acceptable competition:  The fact that there is competition is often scary but it is inevitable (and even positive that it exists). However, it is also true that we must assess whether it will be impossible for us to get a part of the cake. A free tool Ubersuggest 
• Check the product life cycle: With Google Trends you can check what phase the product or service is in based on the trend in its search volume.

 

 

2. Advertiser conversion capacity

 

The commissions that the affiliate obtains, among other things, depending on the ease of conversion that the advertiser's website has, especially in the case of sales remuneration. In turn, the advertiser's conversion capacity will depend, among other things, on:

• Brand awareness in its sector. Here the advertiser can contribute if he carries out a good branding strategy.
• Web design and usability
• Good quality/price ratio of your products or services.

 

 

3. Affiliate Conversion

 

It is not enough that you generate many visits to your website and place a banner in the sidebar or sidebar. It is not just a matter of the amount of traffic. It is very important to focus on the quality of it. We must manage to attract traffic from people interested in the product or service that we are recommending. These tips will help you achieve this:

• Add value: If we make an article in which we answer a question that someone who may need to buy the product or service may have, and we get this person to read it (through, for example, doing SEO for the article), we will have more chances of conversion into Our website and the traffic we have passed to the advertiser's website are also more likely to “convert”.

 

I do not mean that the amount of traffic is not important (which it is), but if it is also of quality, much better will be the results.

• Take care of the design of the banners: The image we transmit is also important for our conversion. Take care of your design, both for the image we transmit and for the conversion strategy. Although this advice seems obvious, the web design should not be adapted to the needs of the strategy, of the sector in which we are.

 

The colors, the typography, the font size, the blanks, the size of the images. All of this will influence the conversion levels that we achieve.

 

 

4. Fitting of the commissioning system

 

I mean that you must be clear about the objective or objectives for which the commissions will be generated. We should not direct the same traffic or put the same calls to action if we want them to fill out a contact form, if we want the user to make an online quote or if we want them to subscribe to a newsletter.

In this case, we must assess whether the strategy that we have to carry out for this objective fits us (for example by sale) because perhaps there is another affiliate program that commissions for another type of objective (for example, by subscriber or lead achieved).

 

 

5. Duration of the conversion window

 

If you are comparing affiliate programs, one of the factors that you should consider is the length of the conversion window that the cookie generates. There are affiliate programs of important advertisers that only save the cookie for 1 day, except if the user has left the product in the shopping cart (in this case they extend it up to 90 days). It is common for the conversion window to be set to 30 days or more.

 

6. Use the advertiser's resources and creatives

 

They are very good at improving conversion levels. I am referring to the following:

• Very useful banners for websites or for advertisements, for example, on display.
• Creative Email templates for Email marketing.
• Text links and keyword policy (SEM).
• "Deep links".
• Newsletters.
• Videos.

It is common for the advertiser or the affiliate platform to help you with this.

 

 

7. Bet on long-tail keywords

 

In the event that the contribution of visits to your website is going to be sought through SEO or SEM, my recommendation is that you choose and work on "long tail" keywords for the following reasons:

• In SEO they are easier to position than generic or short tail search terms
• In SEM they are cheaper in terms of cost per click.

 

In both SEO and SEM, the conversion is so much higher. For example, visits that come from terms such as "calculate car insurance price online" will be much more likely to get them to fill in the fields of an online fee than if we bet on "car insurance".

With the positioning of long-tail, we usually respond to doubts or information needs of users. Therefore, what you should do is think or research the information that the advertiser's target audience will require to respond to it. When we have earned your trust by having solved it, it is when we will include the link to the call to action and we will have more possibilities of conversion.

 

6. Use YouTube as a channel to capture traffic

 

For the young generation, youtube is one of the most popular platforms to share anything in visual audio format. Through this platform you are able to take advantage of the traffic potential that YouTube has, you will be able to drive traffic to your affiliate program. Nowadays you cannot place affiliate links on YouTube but you can redirect from your website and take advantage of it.

In short, With a proper understanding and strategy of affiliate marketing, one can easily generate passive income, no matter whether he/she is a student or a professional. I hope the above basic content about affiliate marketing will help you to understand the roots and function of affiliate marketing so that you can easily fruit income from it.

Author Bio - Aabhas Vijay is a passionate digital marketer and blogger he loves to write about marketing, and email marketing in particular. You can reach him on his blog www.smtpservers.com