Affiliate marketing means to promote someone else’s products on your social networks or a website/blog through images and links, and if someone buys that product using your link, you get a commission.
This is a really popular way of earning some extra income and all bloggers use this method. Even if you don’t have a website/blog, you can promote products on social media. Just have some patience and you will build a great reputation. Now, there are three types of affiliate marketing that people usually don’t know about. We’ll cover them all here and explain them to you in detail.
1) Unattached Affiliate Marketing
These are your basic pay-per-click affiliate marketing campaigns where you have no presence and no authority in the niche of the product you’re promoting. All you’re doing is putting an affiliate link in front of someone via Google Adwords, Facebook ads and instagram posts/stories in the hopes that they’ll click on your link, buy the product, and you earn a commission.
The reason why this type of affiliate marketing is so attractive to many people is because no presence or authority is needed. It takes time to build up a reputation and trust with certain groups of people online and many people are just too lazy to work on a blog or website to create promotions.
This is not a business model and is not really recommended. It is an income generating model, but is it a business model where I can build relationships(I mean business relationships) with the end user? No. With Pay-Per-Click affiliate marketing, you become middle man.
With this model, there’s pressure to focus more on the potential income rather than the customers you’re serving. That’s the dark side of affiliate marketing. I would not recommend this type of affiliate marketing, although it is popular, it will take up a lot of your time and won’t give you efficient results.
2) Related Affiliate Marketing
Another form of affiliate marketing is Related Affiliate Marketing. This is where you have some sort of presence online, whether it’s through a blog, a podcast, videos, or on social media and you have affiliate links to products related to your niche, but they’re for products you don’t actually use. Some followers/trust is required to start Related Affiliate Marketing.
For example – back when text link ads were a great deal, websites used to create a 125 x 125 pixel advertisement for Text Link Ads, which was an older advertising model where you had advertisers pay for having specific terms on your website become links to their products. Most of these sites did not actually use the text link ad service on their own sites. On many personal finance blogs, you’ll see a lot of different affiliate advertisements for various things.
The reality – every person who places one of those links on their blog actually never actually uses each of those products and services. Placing affiliate links on your site that are related to your niche is a decent strategy to earn extra income. Whether it’s in the sidebar in banner form, or in a text link at the bottom of your blog post or mid-text banner, because you have a website and some authority, people will trust you and your decision to place the ad on your site.
If you don’t promote the right products, even if you know the owner or think it might be a great fit, you run the risk of losing the trust you have built with your audience and it will result in a decline in the numbers of customer. It takes hard work and a lot of patience to build trust, and one bad affiliate offer could easily ruin that. This is a disadvantage of this type of affiliate marketing. So be sure you trust the product you’re promoting and there is a team behind the product to take care of your people.
3) Involved Affiliate Marketing
This is probably the best type of affiliate marketing. Involved affiliate marketing is where you have used a product and would personally recommend it to your audience. It is not necessary to place it in a banner ad or somewhere that says “recommended resources,” it would be great within your content. The product almost becomes something people “have to have,” because you are recommending it after using it.
Now, there is a level of responsibility that you have to hold while making these kinds of promotions, especially if you have a lot of authority and influence over your followers.
This is the complete opposite of Pay-Per-Click. You have to talk directly to those who may need a product that you’re offering. It is using your reputation and trust in order to get others to take your recommendation, use it and pay you something in return.
CONCLUSION
You can choose which kind of affiliate marketing works best for you—Unattached, Related, or Involved but the best way is your trust and presence in a niche to recommend the products that you have used.
Never keep money as your primary goal, always give priority to content. Focus on serve first, not income first(I know I’m quoting famous people). Focus on what is best for your audience.
Be as involved as you can with the affiliate marketing process, and you’ll see success with your affiliate income.
Online Business Addict 