What is Affiliate Marketing about?
Hi everyone !
Hoping for this page to soon become an interaction “space” between me and you to discuss about Affiliate Marketing, I would like to give both theoretical and practical information on this fascinating and diversified business modern which can be highly profitable if it is faced with the proper mindset and settings.
Affiliate Marketing , not to be mixed up with Network Marketing, can synthetically be defined as an activity of indirect sale of other people’s “product” through marketing activities, mainly but not exclusively developed online.
By “product” in this Business Modern we certainly mean physical and tangible prtoducts produced by others; as well as courses or info-products developed by other players and made available for us to sell.
Despite the exotic definition this activity that most of the people do not fully understand simply represents the digital and online transformation of the old “representative’s job.
In the past the representative used to meet retailers treating a certain products typology to offer them the ones of the company/brand he officially represented; for each finalised sale the company used to prepare the shipping, the invoicing, the cash collection and after all that the representative was paid with a percentage of the sale itself.
AS in the past today there are the Affiliates, they identify a “product” (either physical or digital), propose it to their friends or followers by highlighting the key features.
For every “click” the potential customers gets access to a web page (usually it is a landing page or a squeeze page) where he will be able to better understand what the product is about, how much it costs, the shipping times, etc.
If the sale os finalised the seller perfects the shipping or download, the cash collection and will pay a commission to the Affiliate for ??????
It seems to be simple so far, doesn’t it?
Operating as an Affiliate brings along a number of advantages:
– I do not have to worry about creating a physical product or an info-product or course
– I do not care about warehouse, shipping, deliveries, payments, returns issues
– I can deal with more product categories at the same time, even completely different with each other, provided that I have (or find) an audience for each of them;
– The affiliate is not tied with the fortunes of the manufacturer or either the digital products’ authors
Obviously we are not so naive to think that there are categories with just positive aspects or advantages, here are some disadvantages:
– As an affiliate you cannot control the product (quality, warranties, realiability) or the producer (price changes, goods availability, etc);
– As an Affiliate operating with certain companies you do not have control of the customer who could receive direct proposals from the producer , thus not earning the expected commission for the sale of the “first” product
– As an Affiliate your reputation is sometimes affected by the low quality of the product you propose, the mediocrity of the Company communication with the end user, etc.
– COmpetition on some Affiliate products that are particularly “trendy” can be difficult to beat.
How much time should I invest in this activity?
Generally speaking acting as an Affiliate has multiple positive aspects, just to name a few you have the right to dedicate as much time as you want or can to this activity; or you have the total discretion to choose the budget to spend on this activity.
As we will see more in details in the next posts, Affiliate Marketing can be split into High Ticket or Low Ticket; the formed is based on high priced products/services and with high commissions (most likely with few sales per week/month); the latter relates to the sale of low priced thus “popular” products where earnings become interesting only in the case of high volumes of sale.
In this first post I believe the introductory information are enough to help you better understand whether this type of activity can be of interest to you or not.
If so, I refer you to the next post and invite you to write in the comments space below your questions or requests of clarification which for the moment I preferred not to properly master in deep.
Thank you very much for your time and …at the next post!
Francesca
