When it comes to monetizing a blog or a website in general, there are many possibilities.
There is not a perfect option for all projects, but each of them will have to find their own perfect match, but one of the most profitable, fast and easy to implement is to sell products online without having to create them yourself.
Therefore, if I had to highlight one of the best methods to monetize your blog or website, for its speed of implementation, profitability and ease of use, I would opt for affiliate systems, or what is the same, for Affiliate Marketing.
And that’s exactly what I’m going to explain in depth in this post: how to sell third-party products and services online in a tremendously easy and effective way, although, as you’ll see at the end of the post, instead of talking about selling, we should rather talk about recommending, since the one who keeps selling is really the manufacturer.
Despite the fact that this way of earning money has been used for many years, there are few who have mastered it and there are still many doubts about what they are or how they work. That is why we have decided that it would be ideal to create a great tutorial to help all the people who find themselves in this situation.
The goal with this article will be, therefore, that you know what affiliate systems are, how they work, how to implement them and see concrete examples of how to sell products and / or services online with affiliate systems.
After reading this article you will have no excuses left to start monetizing your website, whatever the subject matter.
Before getting into the topic, let’s make an initial review so that we are all on the same page and we can follow the whole article.
What is Affiliate Marketing and why does it work so well to monetize a blog?
To understand everything that comes next, let’s give a simple definition of what Affiliate Marketing would be:
Affiliate Marketing is a way to monetize your blog or your website through third-party product recommendations. That is, on your website you will talk about a product/tool/service that does not belong to you, but that can be obtained from the website of another advertiser. If that person then buys that product, you will earn a commission.
So, the idea is that you talk about certain products on your website and get the visitor to go to the website where they are sold and buy them. If you do it right, everyone wins: your reader benefits because he will be left with quality products that you know will give him a good result, you get a commission for it and the supplier gets a sale.
The idea is simple, isn’t it?
I like to say that thanks to Affiliate Marketing, we become sellers of any store or product.
But you may ask yourself:
How does the advertiser know that a visit has been recommended by me?
Here we would introduce the concept of “affiliate link”. This is a special link that will tell the advertiser that this person has come from your website.
What happens if at that moment he does not buy: do we lose the commission?
To fully understand how affiliate systems work, we would ask ourselves this question:
If you enter from my link, but do not buy that day but later, will we still get the commission?
The answer depends, but generally yes.
Actually what they do when that person enters the advertiser’s website from your link, is to insert a cookie.
Surely you have heard of cookies on more occasions, but this is nothing more than a small code that is installed in your browser when you go to various pages. It is not a bad thing, practically all the webs insert some cookie (hence the famous message that we have to put indicating if they are accepted).
The purpose of these cookies is to obtain certain information about the person who is visiting your website. For example, you could know if that person is new to the site, or if he/she has already visited it. Or in this case you could know if that person has been recommended by someone through an affiliate link.
This means that it is not necessary for that person to buy the item at that moment of entering from your website, but by having that cookie installed in their browser, if they do it later, you will also be credited with the commission. The duration of this cookie usually lasts about 30 days, although it depends on the advertiser.
Types of Affiliation that exist to monetize your blog or website
All types will be based on the idea explained above: to offer us a special affiliate link that we can publish on the Internet (on our website or wherever) to recommend (sell) their products and get a commission, thus monetizing our blog.
The difference will be in the system or platform that we will use to obtain that special link and how we will be able to track the results that we get in terms of clicks on it or sales made.
To do this we would differentiate between two types:
Affiliation platforms: it would be affiliation through an intermediary.
Direct affiliation systems: there are no intermediaries.
The way both of them work will be very similar and, once we understand one of them, we will be able to master and use either of them.
Let’s start by explaining the first one:
Indirectly managed affiliate systems: Affiliate Platforms.
Once we are registered in one of them, we will be able to access a multitude of advertisers and their products to sell them (promote them) on our website and thus obtain commissions with Affiliate Marketing.
The procedure to use the affiliation platforms will be very simple. It will consist of these steps:
Register in the affiliation platform that is: To do this we will have to enter our data and usually indicate the website where we will promote the products or advertisers, which we will access through it.
The next step will be to wait for the application to be approved. This should not take long.
Once approved we will have access to the platform. Now it is time to look for the advertisers we want to promote. For this purpose, affiliation platforms usually offer internal search engines sorted by categories.
When we find an interesting advertiser that fits our theme, we will sign up for it.
People from that advertiser’s affiliate account team will review your website and approve or disapprove it.
If you are approved, the only thing left to do is to get the referral links to add them to your website.
At all times you will have a control panel with statistics to see how your links are working and if you are getting commissions.
What affiliate platforms are there and which one should you use?
This type of platforms are very abundant and we can find many of them.
When deciding which one to use, it will generally depend on the advertisers we can find on them.
There will be advertisers that may appear on several different platforms, even offering different commissions for each one. Or there will be some that even have the option to advertise through affiliation platforms and directly, as we will see later in an example.
You are probably wondering how you can find out which platform you will have to register on to sell a certain advertiser’s products online.
What are the best affiliate platforms?
It will depend on the program you want to recommend.
Some of the most famous ones would be: Tradedoubler, Zanox, Webgains, Affilinet, Commision Junction, etc.
My recommendations, based on some specific topics, would be:
Shareasale: To promote tools for a Marketing blog such as could be Genesis Framework, Optinmonster, Godaddy, etc.
Public ideas: To get commissions with a travel blog. You can promote Booking, Voyageprive, Logitravel, etc.
In the end, whether you choose one or another to monetize your blog will always depend on the theme of your website and where you find the advertisers that best suit you.
As a recommendation I will tell you to try to use, whenever possible, the same affiliate platform for the different advertisers for which you promote products. Why? The reasons could be the following:
As you store commission money, it will accumulate in your affiliate platform account. In order to withdraw it to your bank or Paypal account, you will have to reach a minimum amount. If you are promoting two programs in two different ones, the effort will be greater to reach the minimum for payment in both of them. On the other hand, if you are promoting two programs through the same affiliate platform, you will be adding the amounts together and you will reach the withdrawal amount sooner.
As the earnings will be bigger, you will have better conditions. When you start earning commissions on an affiliate platform, the affiliate team is interested in you. That means they will be able to offer you better commissions, as well as personalized follow-up and support. And it will help you generate more revenue.
Etc.
Directly managed affiliate systems
There are many advertisers who, instead of managing their affiliate program through an affiliate platform, prefer to run it on their own.
In the end, when you deal with intermediaries, you are leaving money along the way, and it costs companies a lot of money to participate in affiliate platforms. That’s why many decide to get out of the way and manage it directly.
We can find many programs that use this direct management system. Some of the most famous ones could be:
Amazon: which offers a commission for recommending any of the products in its store (we will see it later in depth).
Ebay: it would work in the same way as Amazon.
Booking: Although we have named it before as being managed through Public Ideas, they also opt for the direct affiliation model by managing their own affiliate program.
The way to start participating in these systems will be the same as through an affiliate platform.
You would find all the instructions to get started from the page of that website by searching for “affiliate program”, “affiliate system”, “referral program”, etc….
Once enrolled in their program, the operation will be very similar to that of the affiliate platforms, but in this case, as it is already a specific advertiser, you will only have to go to the option to get the affiliate links to be able to put them on your website.
