Wondering how to become an affiliate marketer? Here’s what you need to know to get started as an affiliate marketer from home.
What is an affiliate marketer?
An affiliate marketer is a person who refers products and services to customers and earns commissions for their efforts. There are no start-up costs to joining the most popular affiliate marketing programs and you can use your affiliate link in almost any online setting. An affiliate marketer earns commissions from 5%-50%+ by referring favorite books, clothes, makeup, food products, services and more. If there are products you use, most likely they have an affiliate program now.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is based on the traditional idea of going out, sharing the product with a customer, making the sale and collecting a commission from the company. Now, with email, social media, blogs, and text message and more, you can promote products 24/7 using an affiliate link. You can also purchase product, take it to parties and events for demonstration, and get people to purchase right there on your smart phone using your affiliate code.
How much can I earn with affiliate marketing?
Every company is different, and every product or service is a different price. Companies generally use a % or a flat rate payout for referral sales or sometimes even just leads (leading someone to their site). Your earnings are tracked by your affiliate agency and the affiliate agency pays you via direct deposit or check, usually monthly.
How is affiliate marketing different than direct sales?
Affiliate Marketing and direct sales are pretty similar. Both allow you to work from home on your own schedule. Both allow you to make sales online. Direct Sales usually has more incentive for your to grow your team. Affiliate Marketing usually has more incentive to refer sales. Oftentimes there are costs with starting up a direct sales company, including initial inventory, business cards, display, etc. This could also be done with affiliate marketing as well.
What is the best affiliate marketing company to join?
There are many affiliate marketing agencies, as well as individual companies who operate their own affiliate programs. The affiliate marketing agency we are affiliates for and recommend for beginners is ShareaSale. They have a great platform, lots of clients, are easy to use and create links, and always pay on time. They also have lots of mom, family, natural and organic brands you can represent. For example, ErgoBaby is an affiliate with ShareaSale.
Join shareasale.com, Earn Cash!
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How to become an affiliate marketer
Before anything else, check out the FTC guidelines for disclosing your affiliate links. Then, here’s a few steps to getting started as an affiliate marketer.
Create a website
If you want to get serious about affiliate marketing, we recommend setting up your own website and online platform. You can post your links anywhere, but you can only really control your own website, so it’s best to have one if possible. We offer lots of tips and tricks for creating a website on this site.
> Studiopress website themes
Build your house! A website is where your affiliate links can live on the internet (besides social media). You own the house and you make the terms. Check out StudioPress for website themes, they use the Genesis Platform on wordpress.org which (in our opinion) is the best :). We host MompreneurAdvice.com using a StudioPress theme.
Learn more about StudioPress themes
> Bluehost website hosting
You’ll need a platform for your website (like a house) to live on. For website hosting, we recommend our affiliate BlueHost. They offer website hosting for as low as $4/mo and are one of the top website hosting services around.
Build a following
The more followers and audience you can speak to, the more likelihood of making an affiliate referral sale. We suggest growing your email subscribers, writing engaging content on your blog to grow your online audience, building your social circles, etc.
Post affiliate links in your bio and in posts, including:
- Text messages
…and more
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Further reading:
- 14 places to share affiliate links
- Big list of home based business ideas for mompreneurs in 2020
- Top 8 questions about filling out surveys online for Survey Monkey – answered!
- Top six questions about becoming a DoorDash Driver – answered!
