Affiliate marketing is an online marketing technique in which merchants pay commission to publishers, who promote their products and services.

According to a study carried out by Forrester Consulting in Jan 2016, affiliate marketing is emerging as a key tool to engage consumers with compelling products. This is happening due to heightened user expectations for compelling and relevant content.

Almost 84% of publishers are turning to affiliate marketing to get new opportunities for driving revenue to their sites and differentiated content.

While many businesses have high barriers of entry, both in terms of financial resources and an in-depth knowledge necessary to start, affiliate marketing stands out in a crowd as a simple and cost-effective way of making money online.

Spendings in the United States alone for affiliate marketing reached 4.8 billion dollars in 2016 – outperforming the Belize economy twice over. Affiliate marketing has been predicted to reach nearly 7 billion by 2020. These facts validate that affiliate marketing is in good health and continuously evolving.

Total affiliate marketing spend

I. Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing Business Model

Affiliate marketing can be the easiest online business model to start earning online passive income. It’s low-cost, high-prof- it industry. But, it also might happen to be a tough one. The performance relies on your determination, approach and the affiliate strategy you choose to follow. The whole game is about earning a commission.

Affiliate marketing involves both advantages and disadvantages.

The Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

• Passive Income – Earn Money While You Sleep. The key strong pro feature of becoming an affiliate marketer is the idea of earning passive income. Wouldn’t it be great to wake up in the morning, open your laptop and discover extra revenue in your account?
• The Independence– Another benefit of affiliate marketing is the flexibility of working wherever and whenever you want. You can work everywhere as long as you have the Internet connection.
• No Expertise Needed (Practice Makes Perfect)– You don’t need to be a marketing expert to become an affiliate. You can learn along the way.
• Low Investment Costs– The operating expenses of the affiliate business are almost non-existent, comparing to other industries. There are some expenses related to setting up a domain, web hosting operator and also some minor costs of designing a layout, etc. Also, you are a freelancer, so there are no costs for hiring staff, customer service or inventory costs involved.
• Convenience and Flexibility– You don’t need to stick to one affiliate marketing program. You can select a few products from a given niche and promote them on a daily basis. This way you’ll have your portfolio diversified. If one product proves to be difficult to sell, the other one might be more profitable and act as a solid backup.
• Flexible Working Schedule– A home business means you are making your framework and daily working schedule. So if anything unexpected comes up, you can always make time for it.
• Extra Source of Income– Starting up as an affiliate marketer doesn’t require you to leave your current job. You can do it as a side project and see what you can squeeze out of it over the few first months.

• Customer Service is out of Your Interest– Retaining customers and managing customer service related issues gets problematic at times. As an affiliate, you don’t need to worry about that. Anytime you get a post-sale query, you pass such requests onto the merchant’s customer service team.
• Marketing Kit at Right Your Disposal– All marketing materials are provided by vendors, so you don’t need to produce banners or promotional materials.
• The Sky’s no Limit– There are many ways to market your affiliate programs. You can set up an affiliate blog and post about a chosen niche, build up your email lists and come up with affiliate emails, create ppc campaigns, use social media and platforms like Quora to market your affiliate products, mix your organic and paid marketing activities into cross-channel campaigns if this suits you best.
• Performance Based Income– This can be perceived either as a benefit or a disadvantage. Affiliate marketing will verify if you are a skilled marketer and at what campaigns specifically. This will be tested over time.
• Billion-dollar Business – Affiliate marketing is a billion-dollar industry that is lately prospering very well, and this seems to be the primary advantage of it.
• Low-Cost Business Idea– Affiliate marketing is an easy industry to join because there are no barriers to entry.

The Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing

• No Guarantee of Revenue- The performance-based business model can be either a tremendous opportunity or a significant risk. It’s difficult to predict your revenues upfront.
• Freelance jobs aren’t for everyone- It takes a specific personality to feel comfortable with such a working style. In some circumstances, freelancing can result in the isolation.
• You Don’t Control Your Competition- Competition varies depending on the industry. As there are strong benefits of joining affiliate business, a lot of people try their hand at affiliate marketing.

• You Don’t Control Affiliate Marketing Programs- As you don’t own affiliate marketing programs, you have to use existing ones. This means, you are dependent on your merchant’s rules. A program that looks appealing at a time, later can become less competitive and you won’t be able to adjust the terms yourself. All you can do is to negotiate the further alignment, like discounts on products.
• You Can’t Establish Your Customer Base- You commit to driving new leads again and again, unless you engage in marketing affiliate programs that provide recurring commission. However some affiliate marketing programs include recurring payments and fixed recurring commissions.
• Quantity Approach- Affiliate marketing gets associated with spammy marketing campaigns at times. Some short-sighted affiliates tend to produce spammy and misleading content. They paste it all around expecting quick wins.
• Affiliate Links Hijacking- Although this doesn’t come often, there are cases of hijacking affiliate links. This way the fraudster gets someone’s commission and it’s hardly possible to get it back.

II. Savvy Affiliate Marketing Techniques

Affiliate marketing is an umbrella term covering the following techniques to employ and generate profit:

• Coupons
• PPC
• Email marketing
• Webinars
• Reviews

Affiliate marketing isn’t dead. Marketers have to move on and put in place new mature online marketing techniques. You can still be successful as an affiliate, but it takes a quality approach and embracing best blueprints.

There are practical ideas and strategies to put in place once you become an affiliate marketer. All the affiliate marketing techniques mentioned above will generate a stable stream of commissions if applied wisely. It is important to maintain an open-minded attitude towards online marketing trends and search engine algorithm updates.

1. Coupons

Coupons have been a considerable part of affiliate marketing for many years. They let your customers get a discount offer and a great deal on a particular product. After all, as long as you’ll help people save some money, they are going to keep coming back.

The essential component of this strategy is always to share the best deals that are at your disposal. Even if the commission isn’t going to be high, you’ll build up the trust of your audience, and it’ll pay back. Users are going to keep checking back on your site anytime they want to buy another product. Therefore, you should be thinking strategically here and go for a long-term approach to your payoffs.

Coupons can be submitted either to special deals sites or your dedicated website. Apart from coupons themselves, you should also add some value such as information about a product and work on user interaction.

Thus, make sure you allow your users to get involved. Let them comment on your offer, rate your product, join the community forum, etc.

Benefits of Coupon affiliate marketing:

• you provide discounts, and this is always welcome by customers
• it isn’t heavy on content, so if you don’t enjoy writing long blog posts, this strategy can be an excellent fit for you
• you don’t need to stick to a single niche, but mix and match more
• many coupons and deal sites are spammy, so it’s better to maintain quality and earn valuable backlinks

2. PPC advertising

Use paid advertising to promote your affiliate programs. This technique will help you grow your mailing lists, promote webinars and YouTube videos, or direct searches to vendor’s website.

PPC advertising is a way of leveraging search engines to drive targeted traffic to a particular landing page. In this model, you won’t pay for placing your ad on a search results page, but for individual clicks. PPC is the art of purchasing and optimizing the ads for the given phrases.
When users type keywords into search engine, your ads can pop up in one of several ad placements of the SERPS depending on a search engine.

Your ad can appear:
• at the top of a search results page

• on the right side of the search results page

• at the bottom of the search results page

How to use PPC advertising for affiliate marketing?

First, make sure you get in-depth knowledge of PPC. Once you dig deeper, you’ll realize that it’s not enough to outbid your competitors. Google evaluates the quality of ads and favours the more appealing ones. Well-curated ads generate more clicks and are listed higher.

3. Writing Reviews

A review-focused affiliate blog is a great place to start your adventure with affiliate marketing. As a marketer you probably use many tools on a daily basis – and these are not only marketing tools.

There are many personal products you use every day. You could become a spokesperson for them as an affiliate if they have an affiliate program. So if you are an affiliate marketing beginner, you could start with that. Create a site and start writing about your favorite products. Also, re- lease your opinion to the public in the form of affiliate reviews.

This technique is called involved affiliate marketing by Pat Flynn. According to Pat, it’s most effective because using the product you’re selling is the best seal of approval.

How to Come Up with a Good Product Review

First of all make sure your review is helpful and talks about a product comprehensively. It should showcase its benefits and shouldn’t hide any flaws or defects. Coming up with educational, honest, and in-depth product reviews will boost your authority and win you a loyal audience. And this audience will be made up of people who trust your opinion. This comes with a responsibility that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Loyalty is one of the crucial factors for a review-focused affiliate marketer. You should add affiliate links to these
reviews at the right places. But, if you only rely on your on- line reviews to drive your affiliate income, then you need a lot of traffic.
Maximize your affiliate site’s results by implementing SEO best practices and ensure it ranks high in search engines. Running a review blog might be time-consuming – it takes time to build up a reputation, strong following, and a high traffic volume.
That’s why it’s not a fast way to make money online. But in the long run, for a determined content creator, it may become a stable stream of passive income. Review writing is the exact opposite of PPC, since in PPC the customer may not even know you exist.

Apart from a review site, you can run a blog targeted on the strategic keywords that includes affiliate links. If you decide to become this kind of blogger, then it’s all about the content strategy you choose to follow.

You can also become an affiliate marketer without any website.  It involves implementing other kinds of affiliate marketing techniques but it’s possible. It takes 3 steps to succeed at affiliate marketing without a website:

• research the relevant 3rd party blogs and websites and then contribute
• become a community leader – post on Quora or Reddit and establish your authority there
• fall in love with social media

4. Email Marketing

An email is the most efficient online channel these days. It makes it reasonable to leverage email marketing in your affiliate strategy. If you own a site, you can add several subscribe buttons to help you build your mailing lists.

A subscribe button can come in a form of:

• hello bar
tied to the top of your blog or the homepage. This way, every visitor will see it. Hello bars can promote marketing offers that will be sent to the user’s inbox in exchange for the email address and name they provide.

• behaviour popup
apart from the hello bar, you can install, for instance, a be- haviour popup that gets triggered when the user is about to exit the tab.

• sidebar widget
It can serve not only as a great way to gain more newsletter subscribers, but also to promote special offers you have on your website or drive traffic to other content (including blog posts, webinars, and landing pages).

There are other creative options available to grow your email list. Add content upgrades at the end of your articles. This way, you are building up your user base which you can later use for weekly newsletters or updates. Make sure your emails are regular, engaging, and relevant to their interest.

Use Facebook
Among social networks, Facebook is the largest player and most powerful online advertising network that has ever existed. Almost everyone has a profile there. It would be a shame not to leverage this platform in your marketing strategies.

Create a Facebook Page
The most fundamental thing to accomplish on Facebook is to establish your social presence by creating your own Facebook business page. Since you own a website (and a brand), it’s imperative that you also create your own spot on social media.
Facebook Page is completely free to set up:
• select a proper page type
• choose a relevant category
• create a unique and memorable username
• add a relevant profile picture
• add cover image that conveys your branding
• build up your business identity by using clear description
• customize the URL for your profile to boost its findability
• add a CTA button to the top of your page, so your visitors can perform any action you’re counting on

Setting up a Facebook Page is just the beginning; it doesn’t fix anything per se, apart from defining your social presence on the platform.
Once you have a Facebook Page up and running, you should bring it to life and keep it active by posting regularly. Therefore, prepare content strategy for Facebook and a publishing calendar for month or two. Then optimize the timing and spot the winning patterns to maximize the results.

Give Facebook Advertising a Try
What’s important, when you’re starting out with paid campaigns on Facebook it to adopt the right mindset and understand that whatever you spend on advertising, you’re also spending on data. And this isn’t money wasted. Even if you don’t scale up and make money right away – you are learning how to market on the platform – and that’s priceless.
Each product and niche is different and they all resonate differently. Test your affiliate offers, copy, collect data and
draw your conclusions. See what campaigns convert best and assemble these pieces of the puzzle to figure out how specific offers and ads work. Eventually, you will find your winners and losers.
One thing that makes Facebook so exceptional is the enormous user base and the ability to target your ideal customer. Facebook Ads seem to be easier to harness than Google Adwords. Your ads can promote specific products and affiliate links if you’d like, but you can also use them in conjunction with a blog.

Facebook Business Groups
The objectives of Facebook groups differ from those of Facebook pages. Groups offer visibility and networking. Business groups aim to connect various experts and people who are interested in a given topic. Group offers a bit more exposure, too.
By default, members usually get notified about new posts and replies, which tends to keep the conversation alive. It’s an excellent idea for you to join relevant groups and promote your affiliate campaigns there. You can even go a step further and create a business group on Facebook. You’ll be its administrator, so you’ll get to set the rules.

5. Use Webinars to Promote Products

Webinars are becoming more and more popular because they are awesome. Webinars allow you to reach your audi- ence on a unique level that content sites, ppc, or email mar- keting just can’t match. Let’s say you want to buy a sophisti- cated product. What would you prefer to do to understand its functions and usability?
• You can read its documentation, product descrip- tions, and guides,
• or you can join a live webinar and the host guides you through all the possible benefits and ways of using a product. You can actively ask any ques- tions that come to mind, and they get answered immediately.
What seems like a better product introduction to you? I would go for the second option. Webinars are a great chance to educate your audience about an individual product in an interactive and user-friendly way.

How to start using webinars in affiliate marketing:
• practice the role of the host before you start live streaming to help you get more comfortable
• prepare an outline with the key points you would like to include in a webinar and arrange them in a coherent order
• create a few sneak peaks, upload them to Youtube, and promote them on social media
• once live streaming is over, keep your video on the site to share it with people who didn’t join your webinar. This way, your work can snowball your income over time.

III. What are Affiliate Links and How to Use Them Correctly

There is only one-way affiliate marketers can monetize their campaigns – through affiliate links. Affiliate links are essential to monitoring the online performance of marketers. They look and work exactly like any other URL– they connect resources – except for one difference: they serve to pass traffic on to particular affiliate products and, eventually, to drive revenue.

Affiliate marketing is based on the concept of revenue sharing and publishers take a cut, therefore affiliate transactions need to be identified and tracked with precision.
Vendors will give you a unique affiliate id and this additional information is going to be added to the affiliate link in order to let the vendor know who gets credit for the sale. As a result, affiliate links are comprised of a vendor’s url and your id.

How Affiliate Links Look Like

Affiliate link structure example:

If you want to start using affiliate links, conduct diligent research to get to know your market and identify the best affiliate programs. Then, set up your affiliate blog and start creating content. Publish content on your site and submit it to third-party platforms.
In a case you prefer to run affiliate marketing activities without a website, you can start by submitting your content to third-party platforms only and still be successful.

How to use Affiliate Links Correctly

Here are some tips for you to get some SEO benefits from the affiliate links and optimize your own affiliate website:

1. Balance your affiliate links density. One way of balancing the number of links you paste in your copy is to include one affiliate link per one piece of content (page, article or review). Although this is the best solution when it comes to promoting your affiliate campaigns, this is also more time consuming and work demanding than adding various affil- iate links to one lengthy post.
   No matter what approach you choose to follow, the main point here is not to go too heavy on the links.
   According to Brian Dean:
   Affiliate links themselves probably won’t hurt your rank- ings. But if you have too many, Google’s algorithm may pay closer attention to other quality signals to make sure you’re not a “thin affiliate site”.

Find a healthy balance between monetization and user expe- rience. Make sure you bring value and educate your visitors about the chosen topics.

The goal is not to monetize every page, but for every page to be a potential gateway to monetization. Put affiliate links where they make sense. A good content to links ratio would be 1 link per every 1.000 words. This rule will help you ultimately avoid keyword stuffing.%

2. Add Anchors to Affiliate Links- Put affiliate links in the body of the article by making cer- tain words or phrases clickable. Such a hyperlink would look much better than a bare link added to a page:
• https://www.livechatinc.com/?a=TTjtYIygKy

• Try LiveChat

The contextual anchor is much more appealing – it’s clear, user-friendly and looks nice, in contrast to the bare link (especially that the latter contains dynamic parameters and looks messy). Make the anchor text* of your affiliate link descriptive and relevant to the linked source. Your users should understand where they will go once they click through. Here is a good example (although this particular link isn’t an affiliate link, the same rule applies):

3. Nofollow Affiliate Links– Another good practice which you can and should use is add- ing the rel=”nofollow” attribute to your affiliate links. As Google isn’t big on affiliate links, it’s a good idea to nofollow them to avoid the risk of having your site penalized. How does it work? Put simply, once you add a nofollow attribute, Google will ignore the link (i.e., it won’t get the upvote men- tioned before).

If you deliver great content and want to pre- serve your SEO ranking, just nofollow affiliate links.
Simple as that.

How to add the nofollow attribute to an affiliate link?

1. Log in to your WordPress panel
2. Go into your new post
3. Switch to html view by clicking the Text tab
4. Find your affiliate links (use CMD + G)
5. And just add rel=”nofollow” within the a tag

By default a link looks like this in html:

Once you nofollow a link, it looks like this:

4. Tidy Up Your Affiliate Links- Make your affiliate links clean and more user-friendly. Even if your affiliate link is hidden behind a relevant and descriptive anchor, it’s always a good practice to clean it up, making it even more readable and understandable for your users. Of course, you should be careful doing this because in some circumstances there is a risk that your merchant will find it harder to determine the source of traffic or the affiliate’s id.

Links containing dynamic parameters are long and often look ugly. This can deter users from clicking them, mainly because people fear ever-present spam. They also react negatively to promotional links.

Take a look at the example provided by Sugarrae:

This is how affiliate link for OptinMonster looks without cloaking: http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=601672&u=313242&m=
49337&urllink=&af f track=
And here is an affiliate link for OptinMonster after tidying it up: https://sugarrae.com/getit/optinmonster
Now you see the difference?

These two links lead to the same destination, and they both track the same affiliate cookie correctly. Which one looks better and more trustworthy to you? And which one would you prefer to click? If you use WordPress, there is a pretty helpful plugin that makes your affiliate links more beautiful right away.
Pretty Links lets you use tidy links and describe them ac- cording to your preference. Typical link shorteners such as bit.ly shrink your links, but don’t make them more readable.
They still appear spammy to the visitor. Apart from masking your affiliate links, Pretty Links features a hits tracker and a reporting interface where you can see a configurable chart summarizing clicks day by day – so you can use it to measure clicks from various campaigns – including emails, social media, etc.

You’ll find more information about affiliate link cloaking here: How to Cloak Affiliate Links (& Why You Should).

5. Implement Affiliate Links the Right Way– Affiliate links can technically be used everywhere, so this is your call on how to play it. Your whole strategy for affiliate links should be compelling and well-balanced. Optimize it for best results. Be subtle and contextual. Also, make sure you don’t appear spammy.

Blog Posts
Insert your links into blog posts where it makes sense, and it’s relevant. In general, it’s up to you as long as your prima- ry intention is to be helpful and provide information which helps users solve real problems.
Sidebar
Another option is to put your affiliate links on a sidebar with- in your blog. In this case, your content links shall be accom- panied with clickable banners. This method can supplement the affiliate links in your copy and still look non-intrusive and user-friendly as long as your sidebar banners are limit- ed and in number[u] and embrace the same style.
Visuals
Another good idea is to link relevant visuals, so they are clickable. This makes sense especially if you are reviewing your affiliate products. This way if a user clicks on an im- age added to your post, they’ll click through to a particular product page.

How to make your visuals clickable in the WordPress panel?

• Once you login go into your WordPress panel, create a new post and click on
  Add Media button in the editor.

Once you add your graphic, click on it and open the image editor.

Next, change the display settings, so the visual leads to a custom url instead of leading to a media file.

Finally, update the settings and preview your draft to see if your image leads to the right landing page, product page or any other preferred destination.

6. Disclose Affiliate Links– It’s necessary to disclose affiliate links, so you present a transparent and honest attitude towards your users. You should set up an affiliate links disclosure section on your sites. This way, you will be transparent with your visitors and no one is going to complain about your methods.

Disclosure of Material Connection:

Some of the links in the post above may be affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) 16 cfr, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. – source

It is important to disclose your links properly and always follow FTC requirements. Ensure that such a statement is clear and straight to the point. Don’t hide the fact that you earn money on affil iate links. Finally, be consistent, use the same disclosure message throughout your affiliate sites. This will make its contents familiar to your visitors and decrease confusions that may otherwise arise.
Transparency is always welcome in the affiliate business. What’s more, it is a win-win solution for the vendor and the affiliate. Seek out affiliate programs that are transparent and also introduce best practices in transparency into all your actions.

IV. How to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business From Scratch

A) Work With Proven Affiliate Programs Only

Affiliate marketing is known for its convenience, but it does not offer a shortcut to making money overnight. What you should remember is to stick to affiliate programs of companies with established position on the market.
By the way, on the High Paying Affiliate Programs you’ll find plenty of proven partnerships from various niches to choose from.
Proven affiliate programs won’t lure you with promises of easy money and won’t expect you to pay for joining them. They benefit whenever their affiliates earn, so it’s their goal to engage with as many affiliates as possible.

What has made affiliate marketing so successful is its convenience for all involved counterparties. On the other hand, you might have heard that it’s a phony business and you can lose money on it. Well, both statements are true.
Among proven, established affiliate programs and networks, there are fraudsters wanting to take advantage of your effort. Like everywhere. To avoid them, don’t let yourself be tempted by the promise of easy and quick money.

B) Start an Affiliate Website

There’s a number of ways to become a successful affiliate marketer without a website, but we’d recommend you creating a site. It will make your work a lot easier.
Companies like GoDaddy offer bundle deals in which you can get domain and hosting services straight away and on the cheap. All you have to do then is to install WordPress CMS (Content Management System) and pick a dedicated theme for it.
As you can see setting up a website isn’t a difficult or labor-in- tensive task these days. This can get even easier with WordPress. Your affiliate site can be built in one place.
This world famous CMS platform enables you to create a website in a few simple steps. The best part is that you can manage the whole site from there. This includes buying a custom domain, hosting the site, and choosing an appropriate theme and fonts. All this is done through a beautiful, responsive and user-friendly panel.

There are three rules for creating a website is to:
• deliver high-quality content
• win the reputation and trust of your visitors

• follow the best practices in everything you do bit-by-bit
You can build a plain site 100% free of cost. With the support of amazing tutorials on wpbeginner.com, you’ll get your site ready within an hour.

C) Find Your Niche

When you distinguish proven affiliate programs from fake ones, it’s time to consider what niche would you like to be
active in. Choose topics you already feel passionate about. Following your passions is recommendable to make this start a little less restless.
The easiest way to conduct your research is to dig deep into Google or any other search engine. Search for “your keyword + affiliate” to start with. This method will help you find a se-
lection of appropriate affiliate marketing programs.
It’s worth mentioning that big brands use affiliate networks, too. Thus, if you’re looking for an affiliate programs of well- known companies, check out popular networks.
• Commission Junction

• Clickbank
• e-Junkie
• Avangate
• Linkshare
• Shareasale
• eBay Enterprise

Also, if you have favorite products and brands, check out their websites directly. If they run partnerships, relevant information should be found among other internal links in the footer on each page of a given site. A website’s footer always features a list of all critical internal links because this helps with navigating the site.

The best brands and products have a pristine reputation and high brand recognition, and this makes their products easier to sell.
You have to determine whether it’s better to work with independent affiliate programs or with large affiliate networks. Either of these approaches have its pros and cons but it would be hard for you to efficiently combine your activity in both of them. If you want to work independently, I’d suggest you choosing SaaS affiliate programs.
SaaS affiliate programs are usually higher paying, due to the value of software they offer. While it may take a bit more effort to find a customer for B2B-oriented software, revenues from closed deals are incomparable. What’s even more enticing, some of SaaS affiliate programs sell monthly recurring licenses and – therefore – offer fixed recurring commissions.

It is worth to remember that reputable companies allow people to become affiliates free of charge. But, don’t worry if you are asked for PayPal information or your bank account number – the company needs to be able to pay you.

D) Track Your Performance

Once you join partnership programs, streamline your campaign tracking. Set up a Google Analytics and Google Search Console to check and optimize users’ on-site behavior. You want to get a more in-depth understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
Vendors provide their partners with appropriate monitoring panels. Plus, some of them offer apis, so that you can track your campaign’s performance via an affiliate dashboard:

You can use the api to stream your affiliate data to your site. Joining a performance marketing network such as
ShareASale allows you to use their campaign tracking tools.
Yet, take advantage of dedicated affiliate performance track- ers such as LeadDyno which are quick to set up and provide extensive real-time reporting.

E) Implement Creative Strategies

When your performance tracking setup is good to go, you can now focus on crafting compelling campaigns.
Make sure you produce educational and intriguing content of the highest quality. Don’t get discouraged if your commission is low at the beginning of your affiliate marketing journey.
A piece of good advice is to put in place various online campaigns and to switch them up. You can include webinars, Youtube videos, and product reviews and see how they perform, and continually optimize their results.
It is very important to always improve and adjust your affiliate strategies and test out various approaches. Then, you’ll find your winning patterns and see what campaigns can snowball to reach massive success rates. Also, sprinkle affiliate links throughout your content sites by following the best linking practices.
Strive for growth and expand your business. Address common problems and pain points as soon as they come up. Look for new products that people might need. Keep an eye on what your prospects desire and provide them with solutions through your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key.
Your marketing activity largely depends on a niche you chose to get yourself involved in. But you’ll always need organic traffic. Regardless of affiliate program you chose, it is critical to focus on valuable content creation & SEO optimization.
Whatever you add content to your website, make sure it’s helpful to your readers, but also optimized for SEO.

F) Add Value & Promote

The popular ways of promoting affiliate offers include writing honest product reviews, using in-text content links, email marketing activities and offering unique discounts and special offers. What’s crucial, don’t be pushy with your efforts. Intrusive promotions are one of the most common mistakes affiliates make.
Design marketing strategy, focused on providing an in-depth explanation of a problem and suggesting ways to solve it.Affiliate marketing professionals call it presale content. This is what you should put your hands on. Make your content as genuine and insightful as possible and then use various channels and techniques to promote it.

V. How to Recognise a Perfect Affiliate Program?

1. Fixed, Recurring Commission

High commission rates are a must in a perfect affiliate pro- gram. Such a commission should be fixed and recurring. Thus, it makes sense to join and market SaaS affiliate programs.
SaaS products are in high demand lately. Increasing numbers of entrepreneurs are transitioning their businesses to on-demand cloud software. Marketing SaaS products can be profitable to get a stable stream of revenue on the regular for even a few years.
To give you an apt example, let’s look at the LiveChat Partner Program. The average customer lifetime reaches approximately three years here. This sounds like a guarantee of stable and predictable revenue, doesn’t it?

2. Affiliate Cookie Duration

Another detail you should be paying attention to while re- viewing affiliate marketing programs is a cookie life. An affiliate cookie is a small file stored on the user’s computer. It’s used to identify the site’s visitors.
In affiliate marketing, cookies are used to track affiliate re- ferrals. And, such cookies have their expiration date. A cook- ie’s lifespan reflects how much time the buyer has to make you a profit through a given campaign. Let’s say a seller sets the cookie duration to 30 days. This means that affiliates have 30 days to seal the deal, once a link has been clicked.
When this time is up, that’s it – no more profit for you.
But, if a sale is made within this period, it qualifies for a com- mission. This also applies to all recurring commissions.

Remember: it’s the cookie expiration date that decides if it’s deal or no deal. Thus, the longer the expiration date, the better for the affiliate marketer.

What’s the optimal cookie lifetime?

The optimal cookie lifetime becomes a frequently asked question for vendors and affiliates alike. In fact, vendors choose the optimal cookie expiration date according to their needs. For instance, it can be based on the average duration between the first visit and the purchase. Also, vendors worry that a prolonged cookie duration may result in higher payouts for the affiliates. That’s why they often limit the cookies’ lifespan.
AM Navigator suggests that for a vendor it doesn’t really matter whether the cookie expiration date is set to 30, 45, or 120 days. But, it does matter to affiliate marketers. Therefore, it makes sense to opt for a longer cookie expiration date to encourage cooperation and to secure the mutual interest. The longer an affiliate cookie life becomes, the more part- ner-friendly the affiliate program becomes. Since the shortest acceptable cookie duration is 30 days, we recommend you look for affiliate programs that offer a longer cookie life.

3. Brand Recognition

Brand recognition determines how easy it’s to sell a product. It’s easier to become a successful affiliate if you represent well-established and highly trusted brands and products.
So how to gauge brand recognition when you are new to a specific niche? It depends on the business model as metrics can vary significantly between B2C and B2B companies. Before you join any affiliate program, do your best to inves- tigate who your seller is and what’s their reputation.

Customers and Revenue Scale

First, check out how many customers the company of in- terest has and how many countries they operate in. Then, confront these numbers with the market standards and see how much a particular merchant relates to the average. This will separate the wheat from the chaff.

Testimonials

Pay attention to testimonials and reviews – does this product and a brand generate any strong sentiment? The more testi- monials, favorable mentions, and sentiments appear in the community, the better. Testimonials and positive reviews are indicative of the product’s quality and reputation. This is what you – as an affiliate marketer – should be looking for when evaluating every affiliate program.

Social Presence

Also, take a look at the vendor’s social media profiles and study their social presence in niche-relevant communities. Find out how strong social following the merchant has amassed and how active these followers are.

4. Approach to Transparency

Choosing the perfect affiliate program, pay attention to the vendor’s transparency regarding the terms and conditions. This includes crucial information – how revenue is calcu- lated. From a business perspective, transparency can boost conversion rates of any affiliate program and build trust between the merchant and affiliate.
The rule of thumb is: never join an affiliate programs that seem unfinished or underdeveloped. What do you risk? Your revenue is a significant concern then. Faulty agreements can work to your disadvantage. Worst case scenario – you might get tricked.
Unfortunately, transparency is not always well-understood. There are a few best practices the vendor can put in place to
enhance transparency of the in-house affiliate program.

Transparent Affiliate Policy

Merchant’s job is to create a clear affiliate program policy; so you can easily find out what the requirements and ex- pectations are. Such cooperation guidelines should be put in simple words so that both parties are on the same page.
An affiliate policy should also include how-tos, screenshots, and be full of examples.

Relevant Dashboard with Reports

A panel that features extensive reports based on Google’s utm campaigns lets you track your performance. This way you can always know what the status of your account is. While advanced affiliates might track the data on their end, it’s still a great way for a merchant to be transparent and give an access to all partners.

A dashboard will keep you informed about your earnings in real-time. It will show you:
• how your commission rates are progressing over time

• how many paying customers you’ve referred
• how many times your affiliate links are clicked

In fact, charts and figures strengthen your motivation and challenge you to improve.

5. Top-Notch Marketing Materials

We are all visual creatures. We buy with our eyes. This makes imperative to use high-quality and flawless marketing resources in your affiliate campaigns. Top-notch marketing materials constitute another crucial element of a perfect affiliate program.
The responsibility to create a repository of marketing ma- terials rests on a vendor. They should provide you with all the tools and visual aids to help you hit the ground running.
A good affiliate program provider streamlines partner on- boarding process and makes work easier on the affiliate’s end.

While the affiliate’s input is essential and there’s usually a lot of work involved in creating and promoting powerful campaigns, vendors should meet their partner’s halfway and provide excellent marketing framework.

Must have marketing resources include:

• Content – product descriptions and CTA copy
• Guidelines – how affiliates can operate, promote products, and advertise a brand (this includes using logos, fonts, widgets, and brand colors)

• Affiliate Program Updates – affiliates should always be up-to-date about any changes made to the partner panel, the affiliate program itself as well as current promotions or contests
• Automation Tools – such as API or data feed to ensure affiliates are advertising the latest products and offers on their website

• Creatives – visual materials such as banners, email templates, screenshots, widgets, and more resources, approved for affiliate use

No matter if you leverage widgets, logos, banners, screen- shots or copy in your affiliate marketing activity, they should all be of excellent quality and wide variety in each and every affiliate program.

6. Dedicated Affiliate Manager

A dedicated affiliate manager is absolutely indispensable to any project of this kind. An affiliate manager is responsible for managing and supervising an affiliate program and operates in following areas:

• Setting up the in-house affiliate program,

• Helping affiliates get pro-active,

• Dealing with any other operational and marketing aspects related to the project.
• Recruiting and approving affiliate partners,

• Processing commissions,
• Communicating with affiliates on a daily basis,
• Resolving issues related to affiliate programs,

When looking for the best affiliate programs to work with, you should always have a contact person who would help you with all your issues. Without a dedicated affiliate manager, an affiliate partner program cannot be successful.

7. Campaign Builder

Campaign builder makes it easy to create and manage links with unique parameters in one place. Such tool automates the process of generating affiliate links and makes it much more convenient directly in a partner panel.

Though rarely seen elsewhere, we have included a campaign builder in the LiveChat Partner Program. It makes setting your campaigns much easier. This is one of the strongest benefits that make our affiliate program stand out.

8. Educational Aspects

More and more companies offer in-house affiliate part- ner programs. However, only a few provide training mate- rial about it. Affiliate partners need guidelines on how to promote a specific product and brand, so it’s best practice to share know-how with them or even provide certification in the specific industry.
This makes partner education a unique and valuable ar- gument in favor of signing up for the affiliate program in question.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is a viable business model and continuously evolving. The performance relies on your determination, approach and the affiliate strategy you choose to follow. The whole game is about earning a commission.
Affiliate marketing is without a doubt a complicated task, but with a systematic approach and a mighty toolset, your efforts can be streamlined and taken to the next level.