Understanding How The Affiliate Marketing Gears Work

For any beginner in the field, affiliate marketing might sound like an extremely vague concept. Basically, this marketing strategy relies on the relationship of a merchant who want to advertise his/her product, and the “host” website or blog owner. The website blog/owner is called an “affiliate” or a partner, because s/he draws traffic and/or purchases to the merchant’s direction.

- Establishing connections

The affiliate and the online merchant are joined by an affiliate marketing program, which is basically a payment scheme or a contract. The terms are pretty simple: the merchant can either pay the affiliate for every visitor that s/he drives to his/her homepage (pay-per-click), or the affiliate can be paid for every lead that ends in an actual purchase (pay-per-lead).

Among the two affiliate marketing programs, the pay-per-lead is usually the higher rating one. This is because it takes more effort to convince a consumer to buy a product from the merchant. Affiliates usually need to come up with complementary reviews and articles to make the affiliate products look good.

- Stable partner merchants

As a beginner affiliate, it would be beneficial for you to associate yourself with safe and stable merchants like Amazon.com. Being associated with these “foundational merchants” also helps to promote your website and improve your search engine rankings. These bigger merchants usually have higher rating programs as well.

Take note though that the benefits of being an affiliate can’t be reaped that instantly. It takes 6 months to a year before the figures begin to reel in.

A good way to establish long term trust between you and your website visitors, though, is to only partner with good merchants who sell quality products. Make sure that the products you’re advertising are also relevant to your website’s content.