Basics of Affiliate marketing
By: Koduri Sandeep
Tags: Affiliate Marketing Tips, Affiliate Programs, Online Business, Affiliate Marketing

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Affiliate marketing has made businesses millions and ordinary people millionaires.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing where you promote someone else’s product and you get a commission on the sale. You don’t need to buy the product, stock it or provide any after sales support.

How does affiliate marketing work?

You join an affiliate network. You pick up an offer that you would like to promote. It could be any online product or service. It can be referring people to fill a form on a dating website (like shaadi.com), or recommending them an online store to buy t-shirts from. There are thousands of such offers to promote across the globe. Once you choose an offer to promote, you will be provided with a unique link to that offer. You will be able to use this link to promote the selected offer. When anyone visits the offer through your unique link and completes the desired action (like filling a form or buying something), you’ll be paid a commission. Your commissions will keep accumulating in the affiliate network you have joined. You can get paid from the affiliate networks on a weekly or monthly basis.

More Detailed Way

Affiliate (i.e. You) signs up for the merchant’s (or advertiser’s) affiliate program.

When you will join an affiliate program, for every product there you’ll get your unique affiliate link. You’ll have your own login details to login inside the affiliate program where you will be able to track and see your performance. Affiliate uses an affiliate link whenever they mention the merchant on their website.

You can promote affiliate links not only through your website, but also through your blog, through YouTube videos, through Facebook and other social networks, through email and other methods. Modi for example (a normal online surfer) visits an Affiliate’s website.

When you’ll start marketing your website (or promote your affiliate link in other ways), you’ll keep getting visitors. Modi clicks on your affiliate link to visit merchant’s website

When you’ll start getting visitors with whatever online marketing you’re doing, many of those visitors (not all of them), will click on your affiliate link to reach the merchant’s website. A cookie gets dropped to Modi’s computer.

When visitors click on the affiliate link, a cookie gets dropped in their web browser. This cookie will help the advertiser to identify that Modi came through your affiliate link. Modi completes the desired action on the merchant’s website

The desired action could be filling a form, buying something, entering his email or whatever the advertiser wanted him to do. Once the visitor completes the desired action, we say that the visitor has ‘converted’ and a ‘conversion’ has taken place. After completing the desired action, merchant checks for the affiliate cookie on Modi’s computer. Merchant finds a cookie belonging to you and logs a credit for the commission according to the affiliate agreement. Merchant makes reports available that show the affiliate all the visitors and sales (or conversions) from the affiliate link.

You can check these reports on the affiliate program after logging in. At the end of every payment period, affiliate program sends the payment to the affiliate for all the conversions (or sales) in that period.

Usually a payment period is one month.

The site deals with various technology and health related topics. You can find very useful tips, reviews and how to complete various tasks.

When you click on ”Special Offer“, links available at the above site, it will redirect to a different site, which offers an affiliate program. Links like —

Every time a new user signs up using the above links and uses the services https://www.janathapulse.com will get some commission.

Earning money without a website/blog

Create videos relevant to the product you want to promote and upload the videos to YouTube and other video sharing websites. Put your affiliate link in the description of the video so that when people interested in the product buys through your link, you get the commission.

So, it is not necessary to have a website in order to do affiliate marketing. There are countless ways to do affiliate marketing and make money online.

Part two — Affiliate marketing — 2