Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant ,the network, the publisher and the customer.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Types Of Affiliate Marketing
Unattached Affiliate Marketing
These are your basic pay-per-click affiliate marketing campaigns where you have no presence and no authority in the niche of the product you’re promoting. There’s no connection between you and the end consumer, and all you’re doing is showing an affiliate link in front of someone’s face via Google Adwords, Facebook ads or whatever, in hopes that they’ll click on your link, buy the product, and you’ll earn a commission.
The reason why this type of affiliate marketing is so attractive to many is because no presence or authority in a niche is needed! It takes time to build up a reputation and trust with certain groups of people online, and many people are just too scared to commit to working on a blog or website, or just don’t have the time. For many, this is their only option.
Personally, I don’t like this business model because to me, this is not a business model. It’s an income generating model – yes, but a business model where I can build relationships with the end user – no. With PPC affiliate marketing, you become a behind the scenes middle man.
Not for me.
If you dabble in PPC affiliate marketing and are in the positive, I applaud you and I wish you continued success. Trust me, it’s a lot more difficult than it sounds, so props to those of you finding success with it.
Related Affiliate Marketing
Another form of affiliate marketing is what I like to call related affiliate marketing. This is where you have some sort of presence online, whether it’s through a blog, a podcast, videos, or whatever – and you have affiliate links to products related to your niche, but they’re for products you don’t actually use.
Back when text link ads were a big deal, I remember seeing every single “make money online” website with a 125 x 125 pixel advertisement for text link ads. Most of these sites did not actually use the text link ad service on their own sites. On many personal finance blogs, you’ll see a lot of different affiliate advertisements for things like ING, Everbank, LendingClub, and numerous other financial institutions. I doubt that every person who places one of those links on their blog actually uses each of those products and services.
And that’s ok.
Placing affiliate links on your site that are related to your niche is a great strategy to earn an extra income. Whether it’s in the sidebar in banner form, or in a text link at the bottom of your blog post, because you have a website and some authority, people will trust you and your decision to place the ad on your site.
I do have a few of these kinds of links scattered throughout this site. In the sidebar, you’ll see (at the moment) an ad for a “How to Make an iPhone App” product. Many of you know I do have a few iPhone apps that generate an income for me each month, but I did not use this product. I do, however, personally know the owner, which is why I trust him and decided to place that ad there.
Related affiliate marketing is great, but I can tell you that 95% of my affiliate marketing comes from the last type of affiliate marketing I’d like to talk about…
Involved Affiliate Marketing
Involved affiliate marketing is where you’ve used a product or service, truly believe in it, and personally recommend it to your audience. Not in a banner ad or somewhere that says “recommended resources”, but within your content, as part of your life and your strategy for whatever it is you’re talking about. The product almost becomes something people “have to have”, because it’s part of the process.
It’s your involvement and experience with the product that makes that offer so attractive.
There is, however, a level of responsibility that you have to uphold while making these kinds of recommendations, especially if you have a lot of authority and influence over your followers. This is something I take very seriously – even more so now that this blog has become so popular in such a short period of time. If it were up to me, this the only way affiliate marketing would be done, because to me it’s the most honest and most helpful.
This is the complete opposite of PPC, where you’re not even seen by the consumer in order for the transaction to take place. Instead, this is you talking directly to those who may need a product that you’re offering, who have their ears and eyes on you. This is not using your money in order to make money, like with PPC. It’s using your reputation, trust and authority in order to get others to take your recommendation, use it, and pay you something in return in the form of a commission.
