Why start affiliate marketing?
First off, what is affiliate marketing?
In basic terms it’s very specific type of advertising.
A company that has a website and products or services to sell enlists people to link to their website with a specific URL (Uniform Resource Locator – or web address to most of us 😉). Any purchase that is made from the click on that web address is assigned to the affiliate as a sale you get a cut of the sale, this can be anywhere from 0.1% and sometimes as high as 25%. The great thing about it is on some websites a click through can be counted if the sale happens even up to 30 days after the original click through. Make enough sales and you get paid 😃.
Basically Viewer of your website -> Clicks affiliate URL -> Shopping website -> Purchase -> You get paid 🥳🎉
How do affiliates track your traffic?
Say you have a website specifically about Star Wars or cool tech gear then you may want to advertise specific Star Wars merchandise. You can do that through many different affiliate programs, but as a demonstration I will be showing how an example of an Amazon UK affiliate link. We’ll start by looking at the code for a “USB stick 32 GB BB8 TLJ – Original Star Wars Flash Drive 2.0, Tribe FD030708”
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tribe-BB8-Memory-Figure-Keychain-Orange/dp/B078WW34VC/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll1&tag=ACCOUNT-21&linkId=b1abd8b8e1ae59c06d38672b415178f8&language=en_GBBreaking down that code, this is the direct link that will get you to the product normally:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tribe-BB8-Memory-Figure-Keychain-Orange/dp/B078WW34VC/
then there’s
ref=as_li_ss_tlwhich is referring to where on Amazon the link was from.
After the ? is where the information about the affiliate’s code is: ?
ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll1&tag=ACCOUNT-27&linkId=b1abd8b8e1ae59c06d38672b415178f8&language=en_GB
I have changed it to ACCOUNT-27 however that would normally have your own user code in there.
Why choose affiliate marketing?
There’s often a lot less risk than starting a shop, multi-level marketing or drop shipping as the fees for entry are much lower. You can even start affiliate marketing for free with a free WordPress blog, or for very low costs with a domain name and very low cost web hosting.