Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular modern online marketing techniques. Essentially, this technique sees businesses reward others for successfully marketing a product for them. This means that customers saw the affiliate’s promotional campaign and opted to purchase the product or service because of it.
If you have ever wondered how social media influencers make money, affiliate marketing is one of the main avenues. However, you don’t need to be a semi-famous internet celebrity to make money with affiliate marketing.
Loads of people are using this relatively new business opportunity to generate a passive income for themselves. You’d be surprised how many businesses are actively involved in the affiliate marketing game. Some of the biggest names include Amazon, Wix, eBay, and TripAdvisor.
Let’s get into further detail about how this business works below:
How Affiliate Marketing Works
Depending on who you ask, there are three to four core parties in the affiliate marketing industry:
- The advertiser (or merchant)
- The network (optional)
- The affiliate (the publisher)
- The customer
The advertiser/merchant has a product they want to sell. As mentioned above, loads of companies are involved in affiliate marketing, so the spread of products and services involved in this form of promotion is huge.
The affiliate is the person or company who advertises or markets the product. This is the party that tries to convince customers that the product is worth something. They create content in the form of blogs, videos, or social media posts to promote the product, which is why this party is also known as “the publisher.”
The benefit of promoting the product is that the affiliate receives a portion of the profit of every sale they contribute to. Revenues drawn from sales vary depending on the product being promoted, but profits can range from small sums to millions of dollars.
The customer is the party that purchases the product and ensure that both the merchant and affiliate are able to exist. As mentioned above, affiliates will try to reach consumers using various internet platforms.
The network is an optional party involved in the process. Nowadays, publishers can opt to get affiliate marketing deals through a network that manages payments and deliveries depending on the product being marketed.
How Affiliate Marketing Integrates with SEO
Search engine optimization is one of the tools used to aid in affiliate marketing gains. If you are using blogs or videos to promote products, getting your content on the first search engine results page means your content will reach a wider audience.
Reaching a wider audience means reaching a larger number of potential customers. Thus, it is important to ensure that your affiliate content not only explains the value of a product but is SEO-rich too if you want to make an impact.
In all of our affiliate marketing campaigns, we do our best to combine good content with solid SEO techniques to increase sales revenues for our clients. This harmonious relationship is vital to being a successful vendor on the internet.