What is Affiliate Marketing and How to Make Money with it

If you open most of the articles on the topic "how to make money on the Internet", then affiliate marketing will definitely be one of the items. Actually, in this article we will tell you what this niche is like, what fundamental differences exist and, most importantly, where to start in order to make money here.

What is affiliate marketing in the classic sense

Let's start with what is generally meant by the term "affiliate marketing". In simple terms, this is a product or service promotion strategy in which a business enters into an agreement with other companies (partners) to promote its product or service for a fixed fee. It can be a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount for each client you refer.

Affiliate marketing is also called CPA marketing - Cost Per Action - payment for action. 

Various advertising and media buying agencies, webmasters and owners of sites and communities in social networks can act as partners. That is, those who generate traffic on the Internet. 

Modern realities and earnings on affiliate programs

Affiliate marketing appeared at the turn of the 80s and 90s of the last century. Naturally, with the development of the Internet, this niche has changed somewhat. Today, this term is often used to mean affiliate blog.

What it is? Affiliate blog is a method of generating income through CPA-networks, where the webmaster generates traffic at one price and sells it to the advertiser at another. 

Let's say you launched an ad on Facebook and you get 1 lead for $3. And the advertiser through the CPA-network is ready to buy your leads for $15. Accordingly, you can spend one amount on traffic, and get 5 times more for it. This way of generating income is called affiliate marketing.

Here it would be logical to touch on the topic of CPA networks (affiliate programs). As is clear from the diagram above, the CPA network acts as an intermediary between webmasters and advertisers, for which it receives a percentage. In addition, she takes on other responsibilities: 

• Registration and support of partners;
• Generation of unique links for each partner;
• Tracking and evaluating the effectiveness of advertising campaigns through generated links;
• Reporting to advertisers and paying remuneration to partners;
• Creation of additional conditions for the successful work of webmasters (provision of payment cards for advertising accounts, accounts in advertising networks, assistance with the creation and adaptation of landing pages and creatives).

We talked about the work of CPA networks in detail in the article "Affiliate program or direct advertiser: which is better".

What you need to start making money with affiliate marketing

As in any other niche, you first need to study the theoretical part and then proceed to practice. To do this, of course, we recommend that you bookmark our resource, subscribe to our social networks and monitor discussions on the forum. 

Well, in general, the scheme for starting work is as follows:

1. Learn basic information. Understand for yourself what source of traffic you want to work with, how affiliate programs work, offers from which niche you would like to promote. The best way to help you with this is the cases of colleagues.
2. Choosing an CPA-network and registering in it. Meet your manager and ask him to help you choose an offer, GEO and landing page. Here are some CPA networks from our catalog. 
3. Buy a tracker to get all the information about your traffic. The tracker must be connected to the personal account of the CPA network via postback. 
4. Start launching your first advertising campaigns and gaining experience. If you decide to work with Facebook, on our YouTube you will find some guides on how to drive traffic from this source. 
5. Learn, analyze your launches, test new hypotheses and bring your funnel to profit. 

It is also important to note that since you will be buying traffic with your own money, you will need a budget to start. Ideally, this should be an amount that you are not afraid to lose, because due to lack of experience, the first launches of advertising, although they bring a lot of experience, but usually do not pay for themselves. 

How much can you earn on affiliate marketing  and what does it depend on?

And, perhaps, the main question, because of which we have gathered here. And here it is important to note that the CPA industry today is hundreds of affiliate programs, huge 2-day conferences in different parts of the world, tens of thousands of affiliates and millions of dollars of daily profit.

Affiliate marketing is your own business and your profit depends on the size of the budget and the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. Experienced webmasters can earn up to $40,000 per month, and by teaming up, hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

To maximize earnings, you need to optimize conversions, look for profitable offers, create effective landing pages and use the right sources of traffic.