Looking for an Affiliate Marketing Definition?

To try with this relevant part of the internet business, we need first to find an affiliate marketing definition. One that is not only a description from the dictionary or Wikipedia but that allow us to comprehend the many aspects of the field, how it works, how can we relate it to our website and business, how we can profit from it, etc.

Borrowing the brand, the advertising, and even the stock

First of all, in contrast with another traditional commercial activity, you don’t have to be the owner of the brand of the products or services that you’re going to offer in your site. Besides, any kind of material to advertise such products or services have been created by another company.

More important, any physical product that some visitor to your site wants to buy as a result of reading your content is stored and owned by another person or company.

You, as an affiliate serves just as an intermediary between the client and the advertiser. The final trading operation occurs between them, and when it’s done, you get a commission for your role as promoter.

As simple as that!

The merchant, the affiliate and other related terms

Although there are a lot of terms related to the affiliate marketing field, it is needed to understand just a few of them which are critical to the whole process.

• Merchant or advertiser: refers to the individual or company who owns (even though not necessarily produce) the products or services that you’re going to talk about in your website.
• Affiliate: That’s you. The individual (or company) who adhere to an affiliate agreement for the sake of promoting the merchant’s products or services within your business (website, social media, email, etc.)
• Affiliate Agreement: In other words, the contract. The terms of operation, which right and responsibilities correspond to each of the parts
• Affiliate ID: It is the code that an advertiser gives you as an affiliate to know when some referral has bought something through your recommendation
• Affiliate link: the hyperlink you put cloaked or uncloaked in your site to lead the visitor to the affiliate page
• Click: the action a referral takes over a hyperlink in your website to go to the advertiser site.
• Referral: the visitor to your site who thanks to your content gets interested in doing click in the affiliate links of it, to visit the advertiser site.
  

There are a lot more related terms, but these are those in the ones more critical to know regarding this particular way of monetizing your business.

Do you want to know more about affiliate marketing? Learn from the experts: Wealthy Affiliate

Is it the best option for your business?

If this is the first time you come to an explanation of what affiliate marketing is, probably you don’t quite understand the whole implications of it to a specific business or more critical the particular potential to your business.

To give a brief example the value of Amazon till December 2016 was as high as $355.9 billion, that was nearly $60 billions bigger than the $297.8 billions from Walmart, Macy’s, Target, Best Buy, and other companies together. A massive part of all this enormous value was due to the sales through the affiliate programs of the 14 local markets around the world: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, China, Italy, Spain, India, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, and United Arab Emirates.

Today Amazon’s value is one billion below the trillion, just in the second place behind Apple.

So this mode of business works very well for thousands of people out there who adhere to a lot of different programs, not just ones from Amazon.

Adhering to this business model is very tempting for it is free and straightforward to do, but if you don’t do it well, the results could be very disappointing. Now the thing is that anyone can take its affiliate id and paste it all over the internet hoping that many of the internauts do click of it making a revenue for us instantly

Well, this doesn’t work this way; otherwise, millions of people in the world would have taken advantage of the process and would be rich already, which hasn’t happened yet.

Including the affiliate marketing into your business should follow a strategy that starts with your niche, then a well-planned content focused in your audience which allows you to choose the right affiliate program for you and your business and from it which products or services are better on each occasion to show to your visitors. Only then you can be able to insert your affiliate links to an audience who is potentially interested in what you have to offer to them.

Is there a key moment to start affiliate marketing?

The right moment to start with affiliate marketing in our businesses depends more on the focus of them not precisely in the stage of development where your business is.

If at the beginning of your website, you already have a focus, a direction towards you want your enterprise to evolve; then you can take advantage of the affiliate marketing to monetize your efforts.

Let’s say that you are interested in the niche of beauty or fitness, and you want to talk about some issues regarding these niches like skin care or weight loss. Then you can introduce here some examples of products or services that include affiliate links, but also you dedicate a single post for reviewing a specific product, one that is very relevant to your niche so you can centralize the affiliate offers, linking from other posts in your site to this review.

This way, you can start with affiliate marketing from the beginning of your business.

An alternative is that you monetize your site by other methods like selling your products or services, ad sense, e book, etc., and in parallel, you introduce some affiliate offers as part of your monetization plan.

In any case, the important thing is that it doesn’t seem like you are just stuffing your site with any offers and affiliate links because it will cause a loss of trust and credibility from both your visitors and the search engines like Google.

Part of a strategy or a statement of reasons?

The most important message we want to stress on here is that affiliate marketing is just another strategy to monetize your website and your whole business and help you to earn revenue without previous investment nor stock.

However, as any other tool is not the central part of your plan, the core of your work should be towards your content, and it can be focused on a lot of many other strategies.

The purpose of your content should be giving valuable information to your audience, help them to solve specific problems, and then bring relevant opportunities which they can take advantage of.

That’s the sequence of this process, not the other way around.