Affiliate marketing is the way of promoting others’s product or services from your own website or blog. Affiliate marketers are get paid with affiliate commission on every successful purchase of any products and services.
Many online companies who sell products such as shoes, web-hosting space or any service, offer an affiliate program. You can simply sign up for the program and get your unique tracking link. Now, whenever you are writing about the product, you can simply use this special tracking affiliate link to recommend the company’s site, and if your readers buy anything, you will get a commission.
Following are some of the common terms associated with affiliate marketing:
- Affiliates: Publishers like you and me who are using affiliate program links to promote and make sales.
- Affiliate marketplace: There are many marketplaces like Shareasale,CJ and Clickbank, which work as central databases for affiliate programs in different niches.
- Affiliate software: Software used by companies to create an affiliate program for their product, for example: iDevaffiliate.
- Affiliate link: Special tracking link offered by your affiliate program to track the progress of your affiliate promotion.
- Affiliate ID: Similar to the affiliate link, but many affiliate programs offer a unique ID which you can add to any page of the product site.
- Payment mode: Different affiliate programs offer different methods of payment. For example: check, wire transfer, Paypal and many more.
- Affiliate Manager/OPM: Many companies have dedicated affiliate managers to help publishers to earn more by giving them optimization tips.
- Commission percentage/amount: The amount or percentage you will be receiving in affiliate income from every sale.
- 2-tier affiliate marketing: This is a great way of making money from an affiliate program. With this method you recommend that others join affiliate programs, and you receive a commission when a sub-affiliate makes a sale, (similar to MLM or multi-level marketing.) This income is popularly known as sub-affiliate commission.
- Landing pages: A unique product sales or demo page used for the purpose of increasing sales. Most of the programs that you will be promoting have many landing pages, and you can run A/B testing to see which pages convert best for you.
- Custom affiliate income/ account: Unlike a generic affiliate account, many companies offer custom affiliate income to people making the most affiliate sales for them.
- Link clocking: Most of the affiliate tracking links are ugly. Using a link clocking technique like URL shorteners, Thirsty Affiliates, etc., you can turn ugly links into links that can be read and understood by your readers.
- Custom coupons: Many programs allow affiliates to create custom coupons which are also used to track sales. Custom discount coupons help you to increase affiliate sales as well.
Affiliate marketing is a very competitive field and people are always coming up with new techniques. Try to stay Up to Date with the new techniques and market trends otherwise you will fall behind.