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How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Make Money Online

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the various ways to make money online by promoting products or websites to earn a certain percentage as commission from sales made. The sales are made via web traffic. This simply implies that money is made from sales of the product being promoted. What you need to know is that services or products you promote are provided by others and not necessarily you. The only duty you are required to perform is to provide a marketing or sales outlet. So, let’s learn how to earn from affiliate marketing.

Earn from affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick-scheme, so you should not expect millions instantly; this does not mean that people fail in making money through online affiliate marketing. If you want to earn from affiliate marketing, you need to understand how it works and whether it is truly for you.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Wikipedia defines Affiliate Marketing as a marketing practice where a business rewards one or more affiliates for each sale made by the affiliate.

The major thing in this business is that you get rewarded by helping to promote the product or service of a business. For instance, if you sign up for the affiliate program of Tips and Ticks HQ and promote its products, you get a certain percentage which is your commission whenever you send any visitor to the site and they make a purchase.

Affiliate marketing can be said to be one of the cheapest and quickest ways to make money online since it involves no products creation of any kind. To set up your Affiliate Marketing in India, all you need to do is to link up a buyer and seller; once the sale is made, you earn your commission.

How to do Affiliate Marketing?

The first thing to do is to join an affiliate program then select the products you intend to sell. The owners of the products would provide you with an affiliate code you can use for referring traffic to the main site. Also, you will be offered banners, text links and several forms of creative copies in which you just copy and paste the code on your own site to refer traffic.

Any interested customer who clicks on the links from your website will be redirected to the main site where the product is sold and if they pay for the product or subscribe to a program/service and indicate you as the referral, you get a certain percentage as commission.

Your performance can be tracked by sellers through your affiliate ID and other affiliate software used. You also possess a real-time access to all commission and sales stats. Also, in making commission, you don’t always need to sell products because various affiliate programs employ different terms of payment like:

Pay Per Click (PPC) – You make money online depending on the number of visitors redirected by you to the website of the Merchant from your own site, whether you make a sale or not.

Pay Per Sale (PPS) – The merchant pays you a certain percentage of the price of sales made after a purchase is completed.

Pay Per Lead  (PPL) – Once a visitor provides their contact info on the merchant site, you instantly make money online.

Earn from affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing

Why should you consider being an Affiliate Marketer? 

This business is known to be the fastest growing and best marketing techniques on the internet. Enlisted below are few reasons to consider this to earn from affiliate marketing:

  • Free of Cost: Affiliate marketing involves zero investment. Marketing any product online is relatively inexpensive, so the business functioning is cost effective since it was created by someone else. Also, you don’t need to hire anyone or have an office.
  • No customer support: This obviously is not necessary since you aren’t the person who created the products.
  • No shipping or storage: This is certainly not your headache because it would be handled by the seller if needed.
  • Passive income: If you have a normal daytime job, you can continue earning a fixed income. On the other hand, you earn  from affiliate marketing steadily and even when you are not online at times.
  • Work comfortably from your home: If you earn from affiliate marketing regularly, you would have no need to go to work every day. You have the chance to work at home.
  • Global market: You can reach a lot of people around the world and earn from affiliate marketing.

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How to Make Money Online in India from Affiliate Marketing?

By now, you should be convinced that you can make money online from affiliate marketing as a passive source of income and must be wondering how to start. As a matter of fact, India is emerging as the largest digital marketing hub and is giving a tough competition to the digitally developed nations.

But you should understand that you won’t become instantly rich by selling product. This type of business is highly competitive because there are many other people into it. How to make money online in India can be simply answered by following these hacks to gain success in the field: through affiliate marketing, you need to understand the market, know how products are promoted, and understand how it works.

Earn from affiliate marketing
Earn money from affiliate marketing

7 Tips to Earn from Affiliate Marketing

Here are a few tips that can help you to make money online using affiliate marketing:

1. Select a few good products

Most newbies in affiliate marketing make the mistake of registering with too many affiliate programs and try promoting everything they see. If this is the path you are treading, then it will overwhelm you and you won’t promote the products properly. Take time to understand the needs in the market and search for products that will go well with your site’s topic.

Earn from affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing-promote products

2. Employ various sources of traffic to promote services or products

Another mistake affiliate marketers make is that they run ads just on their own sites. This isn’t wrong but there are just so many other sources of traffic that you have the chance to use for promotion all at the same time. The more the traffic that your sales page gets, the higher are your chances of making money online.

Google AdWords is a good way to drive traffic to your sales page. All you must do is run an ad in your AdWords account then use the associated link. You will need to measure your conversions regularly to see if the cost of the campaign is less than its profit to keep it running.

3. Your Campaign must be Tested, Measured and Tracked

Using several strategies for product promotion is a very good idea because it gives you the opportunity to know which of them works better. You can do split testing and measure each campaign’s performance before taking the appropriate action. Changing a couple things would raise your profit. Banner ads should be placed on different areas on the pages of your site because there are some strategic points that will catch your reader’s attention.

The basic statistics of different affiliate programs are shown and you might need it for your campaign but you can still use a conversion tracking software of your own as well.

4. Find out how much the product is desired

Earn from affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing-promote products

To make money from affiliate marketing, you need to ascertain that the product has a high demand. No matter how much efforts you make, you might make little or no sales, it totally depends on the demand of the product. You need to know if it is what your audience really needs. If you manage to get a reasonable amount of traffic on your site, then you can run a small online survey to get input from visitors.

5. You should be current with new techniques and methods

This is necessary because of the competitive nature of affiliate marketing and to be able to make money online. Daily, new techniques and methods are developed; you wouldn’t want to be left behind while new trends take over.

6. Look for and select the right merchant

When promoting a product, you are also promoting the person or organization that owns the product. This should be the first thing to know before selecting the product you are promoting. You surely don’t want your clients to be unhappy after purchasing the product. Trust me; they will never come back to your site again to purchase anything! This is because you have dented your credibility. Normally, any company or website with good customer service is bound to have happy customers.

7. Use the necessary tools

Earn from affiliate marketing
Make money with affiliate marketing

To boost your chances to earn from affiliate marketing, various sites have various tools to make your campaign more efficient. There are a lot of tools which would be helpful out there. For example, if you use a WordPress site, then you should think of getting a plugin that is like the Affiliate Link Manager. Online money making is eased with the usage of right tools. 

Developing your Affiliate Marketing Business

When you start a business, you would want to make sure it lasts long. To keep your business flourishing, you need to do a lot of things. To make money online from affiliate marking needs to be strategized to continue the earnings. If you want to your business to rise, consider the following:

1. Study and learn from other people in the business

This is the easiest way to gain experience because you get exposed to other affiliates. You can meet people by joining a discussion forum or an online community. The good thing is that they are free to join and you get very good advice there. Examples of such online communities are ABestWeb, Digital Point, and Warrior Forum. Apart from getting advice from more experienced affiliates, you get the chance to network with other marketers.

2. Create and build relationships

There is so much work in affiliate marketing, therefore, you need to be patient before making money online. Traffic is driven to the website of the marketer through affiliate marketing programs but as the marketer you have the responsibility of creating and maintaining relationships with partners.

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3. Get the targeted traffic

It is one thing to get people to visit your site but it is another thing to make money online by conversion of leads. There are four main methods to attract potential customers:

  • Free Advertising: You get to place ads and links on free websites to drive traffic to your website. Examples of such websites are US Free Ads and Craigslist. This method allows both you and the free site earn from affiliate marketing when someone clicks on your ads.
  • Paid Advertising: In this method, you will need a combination of graphics, ad, and link that is highly-clickable. With the use of PPC ads, you make money online whether the visitor makes a purchase or not. Google AdSense makes it quick and easy.
  • Email Marketing: This method involves the marketer to embed a form for email subscription for visitors on the site. You get to have the visitor’s name and email which would help you maintain a long-lasting relationship and the lead gets a regular newsletter from you.
  • Article Marketing: A higher ranking in search engine results are sought in this method to generate higher number of leads. Websites like Ezine Articles are used in publishing articles having a unique ‘resource box’, eventually when other website managers and bloggers republish the article, the marketer earns a higher rank in the search engine.

4. Make a PPC Ad

PPC (Pay Per Click) ads are the main ingredients of affiliate marketing. So you need to write a good ad to generate sales and incerase online money making. 

Some criteria for a good PPC Ad are:

  • It should address a problem consumers normally encounter and attract them with a solution.
  • It must have a certain strong keyword that will drive traffic.
  • Keywords are reflected on the main landing page.
  • Whip up a call to action to give direction to the pitch you have created. This will be accomplished by clicking the link.

5. Pursue quality over quantity

Having several affiliates is not a guarantee of making money online. Studies show that a successful affiliate marketing campaign requires you to get the right collaborations that would drive traffic to your site. Whether these associates are big or small sites or even a combination of both, you must create and maintain strong relationships with the affiliates.

Conclusion

Hopefully, by now you must have understood how to earn money through affiliate marketing and ready to start affiliate marketing.

To earn from affiliate marketing takes a lot of work so don’t expect instant results. You need to know how affiliate marketing works, get the right product, create the platform and run the most suitable ads to generate quality traffic to generate leads. If you don’t get it right the first time, don’t worry, you can try it again and improve your mistakes. Remember that learning from other affiliates would help you overcome a lot of errors as well.

Affiliate marketing has a very good future because a lot of organizations would eventually adopt it soon, so why not seize the opportunity now? Have a look at these Affiliate Marketing Websites to make money from Google.

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Avatar of deepesh sharma
Deepesh Sharma
By education, a B Tech graduate and MBA from IIM Lucnknow. Deepesh's journey from an engineer to a Digital Marketing has been exciting. He started his career as an Entreprenuer, founded editings.in. Now with 7+ years of experience into Digital Marketing, currently Deepesh leads Digital Marketing for Digital Vidya, having expertise into the areas of: - Digital Marketing strategy & implementation - Lead Generation, Improving Sales Processes & hence ROI for the organization - Plan, coordinate and run digital marketing campaigns through analytical decisions - Lead Generation & Customer Acquisition

44 thoughts on “How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Make Money Online”

  1. Hii deepesh,
    This is best Blog for Digital Marketing professionals.and Best way to elaborate to Affilliate marketing.
    And your Earn Money concepts of Affiliate marketing is very good.

    1. Avatar of deepesh sharma
      Deepesh Sharma

      Thanks Krishna, glad you liked it. And trust me its not that easy to earn money via affiliate marketing. You got to work really hard to create a holistic environment on your blog/website for people to enter into the funnel and take some action. All the best! 🙂

  2. Avatar of akshay lendey
    Akshay lendey

    Good guidance of affiliate marketing and will surely follow these techniques for my blog to promote it in correct way..
    Thank you…

  3. You are a big help to me. I just made my blog and started doing affiliate marketing however I am struggling on the next step. I don’t know how will make people buy through my blog. It’s frustrating you know. What you said lifted up my spirit and I wish I can see sales next month or so. Cheers!

    1. Avatar of deepesh sharma
      Deepesh Sharma

      Hi Mike, I know at times it is difficult, but not impossible. It may take some time at times, but if your base work is strong, affiliate marketing could give emmence results. Once its set, it would work like a machine.
      I am glad you find this article helpful. All the best!

  4. Avatar of dharmendra yadav
    Dharmendra Yadav

    Do you think that super affiliates necessarily need to use PPC to power their campaigns? Or is it possible to make big money with affiliate marketing without using PPC?

    1. Hi Dharmendra, Good question.. I would recommend a right combination of both paid and non paid promotion would be beneficial. But at the same time it totally depends on the niche you are working in.. Your decision depends on the niche, high commodity product, low commodity products, headonic or utilitarian aspect etc.

  5. Dear Sir,
    I start my own blog.
    now i want to start affiliate marketing by submitting my blog for create an account.
    Please visit my block and revert me is it ok to approve for affiliate marketing

  6. Superb many people try with Blogging but after sometime they leave because sometimes they won’t get ads and sometime no revenues even after doing very hard job, they must read this article so that they come to know Adsense ads are not the only way to get earned via blog, this is superb info, I admire.

    1. Hi Zirish,

      Creating blog would not be enough to start earning money. Since every company, blog or website need to be promoted to generate business. You should apply all digital marketing techniques to promote your blog which includes SEO, PPC, promoting your blog on social media groups relevant to your niche etc.

  7. Hi,

    Hope you doing well,

    I have started blog strangefacts.in and I have placed some affiliate links on it,. But there is no improvement, just getting clicks and nothing else, I need some advice please.

    waiting for your reply

  8. Hi Deepesh,
    I regularly read blogs that provide information about affiliate marketing and your article provides quality informatin on this topic keep up the good work and thanks for sharing.

  9. Hi Deepesh,

    It was a really knowledgable blog.I am new to affiliate marketing.I want to know if I write one blog per day with affiliate link attached to the blog. Will that help me to earn money after some time.

    1. Hi Ahmed/Awanindra Raj

      As I shared creating blog would not be enough to start earning money you need to promote your blog through digital marketing which would help you to generate relevant traffic to your website. I would suggest attending our free demo session on digital marketing where we would be sharing how digital marketing can help you to promote your business or blog: https://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/dmo

      Hope to see you in the webinar.

  10. Hey
    you really tell in depth how to make money as affiliate online thanks for sharing
    keep it up for the good work

  11. I started blogging since 2016, and still struggling to get huge amount of traffic. I usually monetize my content with affiliate links as well as with AdSense. But no income still ! I don’t know where I am lacking, can you please check out my site, n suggest me what to do next?

    1. Nikhilesh: I would suggest working on your blog through SEO, Social Media by engaging through some top groups on facebook which are relevant to your niche.

  12. Avatar of vikram mehta
    Vikram Mehta

    Hi,

    I Vikram Mehta want to start online work for earning.

    So pl. suggest me how i can start.

    Thanks

  13. Hi Deepesh,

    I particularly like the passive income aspect of affiliate marketing.
    It’s like getting interest on interest instead off having to work for an hourly wage.

  14. Hi, it is really helpful. But as I am new in digital marketing I understand earning money through digital marketing needs hard and sincere work.

  15. If you want to make good affiliate marketing, you should first create a blog or a personal brand
    That helps a lot for your business
    Thank you

  16. Avatar of satpal singh
    Satpal Singh

    Hi,
    This is very helpful especially for beginners like me. Thanks for sharing such a valuable information.

  17. Avatar of md tarikul molla
    Md Tarikul Molla

    Dear Sir,
    I start my own blog.
    now i want to start affiliate marketing by submitting my blog for create an account.
    Please visit my block and revert me is it ok to approve for affiliate marketing

  18. Avatar of bhoomi sharma
    bhoomi sharma

    wow what a great website, i was very confused about affiliate marketing but i got my all problem solution, thanks

  19. Avatar of ashish haldar
    Ashish Haldar

    Hello sir,
    Nice post thanks for sharing. Sir, I want to ask you a question If I don’t have any website on that time how can i approve my affiliate Account

  20. Hi,
    Thanks for the article, some good info. I’m on a budget and so looking for best free and cheap methods of getting traffic. I see in the free section you said to advertise in craigslist and us free ads, I’ll definitely give that a go, do you have any other good free traffic tips?

    Cheers

    Cheers

  21. I like this article about affiliate marketing tips. I know many tips but I learned some new tricks from this article. This article really helped to know about affiliate marketing. One of the tips I like in this article is the fourth tip. Thanks for your great article.

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