You might be here in two probable cases, either you are running an online business or you are planning to start one and want to know the sources of income in online business. Affiliate Marketing can contribute to a huge part of your online earnings if used in proper ways and in case you don’t know what it is and how it can help you in earnings, you are at the right place. You just need to read this article to know what exactly is affiliate marketing and how to use it.
In a basic sense, affiliate marketing is the promotion of some products and getting some advantage in the form of earnings for anyone who buys that product through your link.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is one way of marketing used to promote the product or services by merchants by sharing a commission on the sale of product or services. Affiliate Marketing is run by most of the popular online stores to promote their products and increase their buyers. Anyone joining this program gets benefits for promoting their products and can uphold good earnings from this. In this space, the commonly used terms are: Merchant, Affiliate Network, Publishers, Affiliate Link, Affiliate ID and the customer.
Merchant: Merchant is also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand, they are the one who wants to promote their product or services and wants to increase the buyer base. They can be one individual company or online retail shops like, Amazon, Flipkart etc. These are the one who will share a percentage of their earnings with the Publisher or Affiliates when anyone buys any products using an affiliate link. They will generate and provide affiliate URL that can be used to promote their products and services by publishers.
Publisher: Publishes or Affiliates are the ones who promote the product or services of Merchant using an affiliate link. Publishes uses their affiliate link or URL in various ways to help merchants sell their product and earn some commission out of it.
Affiliate Network: Affiliate Network also known as affiliate marketplace are intermediary companies that provide a link between a publisher and the merchant to allow merchants to promote their products using affiliate marketing and publishers the ability to find and join those affiliate programs.
Customer: These are the end users who is looking for the product and purchases the product.
Affiliate Link: This is a unique tracking URL provided by the merchants that are used by publishers to promote products and services of the merchant. Merchants use the affiliate link to track the sales done by a particular affiliate.
Affiliate ID: This is the unique identifier for a Particular Affiliate provided by merchants, which is generally embedded in the Affiliate Link and used to identify sales done by the affiliate.
How and where to register for affiliate marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a very popular program now and you can easily find it on some giant online stores like Amazon, Flipkart and many others service providers. Though there are different requirement to become an affiliate for different sites or service providers, but in most of the cases anyone running an online website or any YouTube channel or anyone who can promote their links can sign up for their program and they are provided a unique affiliate iD. You can also join affiliate programs from Affiliate Networks.
You will have to furnish some basic details like your details, name of the main website where you will be promoting their product services, nature of the site and your business, your bank details where they can send your earnings. Usually all sales or leads provided through your affiliate URL or affiliate ID goes through a verification process. The duration of verification varies from 30 days to 90 days in general. Some affiliate sites and Affiliate networks verifies the sales in less than 30 days as well.
How and where to use your affiliate links?
Once you re registered and are approved for the affiliate program you will receive your unique AffliateID or Affiliate Code and in most of the cases your unique URL as well. The Affiliate URL could directly land the users on the main site or to any specific product or services page. The process of getting the service specific Affiliate URL is known as deep link.
To generate your affiliate links or affiliate deep links, there are different procedures on different websites.
On amazon, it is the easiest to convert links to your affiliate ones. You get a separate bar for your affiliate program when you are registered and you can easily control everything from there. You can directly get links from there, moreover, you can also get image links to have promotions in the form of advertisements.
On Flipkart, they have a different URL which need to visit and after logging in there with your username and password, you need to copy a normal flpikart URL there to convert them to your affiliate links.
Another way to convert any link to your affiliate link is by pasting you affiliate id at the end of that particular link. But you need to know the proper syntax before doing that.
You can use these links anywhere on your website or in the description of your YouTube videos or anywhere where you feel someone might be interested in buying that product.
How your sales or leads get tracked?
Most of the program uses cookies to track sales from any affiliate. The latest affiliate’s cookie gets preference in most of the cases. So if a user’s lands on a product by using affiliate link of say Affiliate A, and the same users lands on the same product by affiliate link of Say Affiliate B after some time and purchases the product. The sale will be considered to be done by Affiliate B. This mechanism is true for most of the affiliate program and affiliate network.
How do you receive your benefits?
You get your benefits in form of %age of the amount of the product sold using your unique links with Affiliate ID or Affiliate code. The %age you get for different products vary and you can get a complete list for different websites to know how much you will earn from different products.
One important thing to notice here is that you don’t only get benefits for the product link you shared. If you shared a link for any of the products, and someone uses that link to buy some other product, you get the same benefit which you could have got for that product
To receive your benefits in your bank account, you need to provide some more information which includes your PAN details and Bank account details. Once you are done with this, the benefits will be automatically transferred to your bank account once in a month.
For some websites, you might require to provide PAN details even before you register for their affiliate program.
I will be explaining how to register and use your links on Amazon and Flipkart in next articles so do subscribe to my articles. If you have any queries related to this article, just post them below in comments and we will do best to respond to you as soon as possible.
