What is Affiliate Marketing? And, How to Get Started!

Affiliate marketing is one of the methods of e-commerce that allows product owners and marketers many benefits, it allows profit for both parties and offers them an opportunity to enhance their business projects with few costs, we find the marketer can create an electronic store without buying products, and also the owner of the product can market his products and increase his sales with few costs and risks, which is represented in the commission granted to the marketer.

In this guideline I will address affiliate marketing in all its aspects, to learn about what it is, its importance, and the benefits it provides to all parties and then take a look at how to start it and recommend some helpful tools in affiliate marketing and conclude with a set of tips and learn about the challenges of practicing affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of e-commerce method that consists of marketing products and services owned by other companies, individuals, and electronic stores, and when this marketing results in a sale, the marketer is granted a commission on it. The commission has an estimated percentage of the price of the product, for example, 10% or 40%, and it can also be an amount of money, for example, $ 20 per registration on the site or for each purchase of the service.

Simply put, affiliate marketing consists of three main parties, namely the owner of the product or merchant; who may be a company, store, or ordinary person; the other party is the marketer who markets these products through different marketing strategies and channels, and the third party is the consumer or buyer targeted by the marketing efforts of the marketer. A fourth party may be affiliate platforms that bring together product owners and marketers. A person may be both a trader and an Affiliate of other companies' products and services.

If we approach affiliate marketing in terms of the practical dimension, it consists in subscribing to the affiliate marketing program of the company or site in question, which is always free. Hence marketing the products or services of this site, whether on social media platforms or through paid advertising, or through the establishment of a special store to market these products, and when purchasing the product the owner of the product will bear all the costs and burdens of processing, shipping and delivering the product to the buyer.

Also, affiliate marketing is not limited to marketing products and services, it is possible to have a commission to attract people to subscribe to and buy from a site subscribe to a mailing list or other transfers from downloading applications, and files, clicking on links and collecting phone numbers. Each has its own marketing method and platforms.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has received considerable attention from businesses and individuals alike, with the affiliate marketing industry expected to reach $8.2 billion in 2022. Therefore, we find it applied by many companies and practiced by many marketers and has hundreds of platforms and types, for the benefit it offers and is represented in the following:

1. Low operating costs

Affiliate marketing doesn't need that much capital. Whether for marketers or product owners, product owners will reduce the marketing costs of their products and services, and marketers and entrepreneurs get the opportunity to engage in the world of e-commerce without going through the complexities of making, storing, shipping, and delivering products.

Now, if you're thinking about starting affiliate marketing, you only need to sign up for a company's affiliate program, and then market the product or service by posting on social media platforms, creating your own landing page, or through a blog or website.

2. Access to foreign markets

Affiliate marketing is one of the appropriate techniques to deliver products to new markets, especially markets that are outside the country and whose entry barriers are high. Through affiliate marketing, products and services are marketed all over the world. For example, marketing a hair care product from an American company in Saudi Arabia.

Another great benefit offered by affiliate marketing is to try the product in new markets and learn about the demand for it, which helps in strengthening the strategy of companies to expand and aim to increase their market share, without bothering to access those markets and market products. All information from these markets is available in the Affiliate Program Control Panel.

3. Low risk

Low cost means that there is a low risk in affiliate marketing because nothing is paid until after the product has already been purchased by the buyer, which means that the owners of the products will not bear any costs, which is a suitable solution for small and medium businesses with a limited budget. Marketers also will not incur any risks or costs if the product is not sold.

4. Promote the growth of business activities

Through affiliate marketing, businesses will have a way to boost their growth, and increase their customer base. In addition to creating targeted mailing lists to market their products directly. And do not forget about the data that these companies get through affiliate marketing.

Entrepreneurs and marketers, they can also market a variety of products, helping them to grow their own businesses without high costs.

5. Product diversity for buyers

Buyers in some countries may not be able to get the products they want, which may be of high quality, low price, or even certain products since they no longer exist in their country. There is a range of barriers to accessing these products online, whether because of language variation or lack of online search skills.

But through affiliate marketing, buyers will get the products they want in the language they understand and the ad may be posted in a local Facebook group, giving these buyers a range of diverse products and services of high quality and reasonable price.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing

Now, you can start affiliate marketing and marketing other companies products and services, but there are some necessary steps to take, to get the results you want to achieve. Knowing that you will need some skills. For example, content writing, design, website development, and landing pages, and if you don't have these skills, you can hire people who specialize in these areas from Fiverr for microservices, and now let me prepare for you the steps to start affiliate marketing:

First, select the domain you want to work in.

As we know that there are many products and also a lot of topics and areas in which content can be presented, you must select the area in which you want to work. For example, the field of technology of smartphones, computers, and accessories, or the field of cooking, e-marketing, or even sports. This area will determine the nature of the content you offer, as well as the type of products you will market, the personality of consumers, and the appropriate marketing methods. Before selecting a domain, you must go through these necessary steps:

1. Identify your interests

You have to come up with a paper and start recording a list of ten interests for you, as we know that affiliate marketing will last for several years, and if the field doesn't interest you you will leave it in the future. So, after writing down the ten interests, you have to identify three of them that have to do with each other. These interests can be activities you like to practice in your leisure time or areas where you like to delve deeper into and learn about all their aspects. It is also possible to be within the field or discipline you are currently studying or working in.

2. Identify the problem

After identifying the three interests, you should start looking for the things that your target consumers want and the problems they are experiencing, and you can do so by using the affiliate tools that we will learn about later in this article. Or by communicating with consumers or even by taking a look at the products offered by competitors.

3. Study competitors

There are some areas where competition is high, and this is not necessarily a bad indicator, it means that the area you want to work in is profitable. So, you have to research and delve deeper into finding the weaknesses that competitors suffer from to exploit when entering this field. For example, content provided by competitors may be of little quality, lack of transparency in information, or even learn about a new marketing strategy.

4. Study the profitability of the field

After you've identified your industry and identified competitors' weaknesses, you need to start your research to find out how much commission you'll get for marketing these products. For example, there are products on which the commission is high such as business management software and the like, and there are some products with low commissions such as PlayStation, whose commission is approximately between $ 2 to $ 3 per sale.

This certainly has an impact if you rely on marketing through paid campaigns, in which case the commission collected should be higher than the advertising cost per product or gross profit than the cost of the advertising campaign.

5. Try your domain

Start by creating a landing page or marketing for a single product on Facebook, and then make sure that the demand for that product is high. Then create the store, site, and page on social media platforms or YouTube channels.

Second: Choose the platform you want to work on

There are many platforms from which you can start with affiliate marketing, and there are some marketers who believe that it is necessary to create a blog to start affiliate marketing, and they believe that it is an essential part of affiliate marketing, while other platforms are only channels to get visitors to this blog or site. But let me tell you that e-marketing strategies are several.

Now, you can start affiliate marketing through Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Twitter, or even through paid ads on other sites or YouTube channels, or by buying advertising space on a site. What's important is that affiliate marketing platforms are many and varied and are not limited to blogs only. These platforms include:

1. Blogging

One of the oldest affiliate marketing platforms to date is dominant in the arena and is profited from by providing content to visitors in many areas. For example, technology, annotations, e-marketing, medical content, and reviews. Within each article, a product or group of products related to the content is added.

For example, in an article about the best phones of 2021, it is possible to add affiliate links to these phones to the article in the "Buy the product" button and the same for the rest of the fields. This blog is totally based on search engine marketing and can be attributed to a Facebook page, Twitter account, or paid advertising.

2. Landing pages

Landing pages are marketing methods for products that rely on paid advertising on social media platforms or search engines, to attract potential buyers and then convert them to existing customers. It is also accompanied by email marketing or the so-called sales funnels that focuses on convincing potential consumers to buy the product.

3. Online Stores

These stores are similar to the online stores of product owners' stores, but only products are displayed on them, and then product links are added to convert buyers to other sites, and then they buy the product and the store owner gets a commission from each sale. As for the ways to market an online store, they are always similar to a blog. Online stores are more documented than landing pages and allow for permanent buyers.

4. YouTube

A YouTube channel can be treated like a blog, although the quality of content is different, the strategies and areas remain the same. It is now possible to create a channel that deals with reviews of programs and games, and then add a link to buy the program or game in the video description.

5. Facebook

Currently, there are a lot of people who market products and services on Facebook groups or by creating pages that offer content related to a domain. What distinguishes Facebook is that it has a lot of users in addition to the diversity of content that includes text and visual content. We also find Instagram which is suitable for marketing products through visual content. All of these platforms give you paid advertising services, and there are many other platforms where you can shop for affiliate marketing such as Twitter.

Third: Content Creation

In this step and after you have determined your platform, which should be suitable for the products you market and the content you want to create, you should start creating content in its various forms, such as articles, posts, tweets, and visual content from videos and photos. In the next lines, we will discuss a set of tools that will help you create content in the field of affiliate marketing in general.

Fourth: Participation in the affiliate program

To shop for products and services, you have to subscribe to the affiliate program of a company or website, and through this program, you will review the sales you have made, and then the commission will be added to your account automatically. After subscribing to the affiliate program, you will be given your own link to follow up on sales.

Fifth: Add links

After choosing the platform, creating content, and signing up for an affiliate program, the next step will be to add links. If you have a store or blog, these links should be visible and clear to site visitors. The same goes for other platforms, and it's a good practice to tag these links in your content or videos if you're shopping on YouTube.

Affiliate Marketing Tools

In this part of our Affiliate Marketing Guide, I'll address a set of tools that help you with your affiliate marketing project, starting with Google Analytics for your blog, keyword recognition tools and popular content among the community, and a tool for creating landing pages and email marketing, and finally, tools to help you create content: