Affiliate marketing is a form of performance-based marketing in which affiliates earn a commission by promoting the company’s products. You find a product you like on Afrimash, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make. For each visitor or customer brought to a product page by the affiliate’s marketing effort there is a reward.

Affiliates are not employed by the advertiser whose products or services they promote, but the compensation models applied to affiliate marketing are very similar to the ones used for people in the advertisers’ internal sales department.

In affiliate marketing three major factors come into play;

• The Merchant: This is also known as the creator, the seller, the brand, the retailer, the vendor, or the company. This is the party that creates the products or services.
• The Affiliate: This affiliate party is sometimes also known as the publisher. Affiliates can be just a single individual or a company. Affiliate marketing business can produce a few hundred naira in commissions each month or tens of millions of naira, depending on how effective the marketing takes place. This is where the marketing takes place; an affiliate promotes one or multiple affiliate products and tries to attract and convince potential customers of the value of the merchant’s product so that they actually end up buying it.
• The Customer: the customer or consumers makes the affiliate system have a complete cycle. Without conversions, there wouldn’t be any commissions for the affiliates and no revenue for the company. The affiliate markets to the targeted consumers on whatever channel they have their audience, whether that’s a social network, digital billboards or through a search engine using content marketing on a blog. The consumer might not necessarily know that they are part of an affiliate marketing system.

Affiliate marketing coincides with other internet marketing methods to some extent. This is because affiliates sometimes use regular advertising methods. Some methods that Afrimash has been able to maximize include:

• Blog post
• Direct purchase for customer using affiliate code
• Publishing reviews  
• Content marketing

On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner

Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both types of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. The two forms of marketing are differentiated in how they drive sales, for affiliate marketing, affiliates depend purely on financial motivations, while in referral marketing, the referrer depends on trust and personal relationships. But affiliates can incorporate referral marketing as a means to reach out to their targeted audience.

Baby Steps to Becoming a Successful Online Affiliate Marketer

The basic steps needed to start your journey on affiliate marketing includes:

1. Review your product of interest in connection to your niche:  Before registering to become an affiliate, start reviewing products in your niche, if the product or service you want to market corresponds to the audience you have on your platform.
2. Compile the emails or any other contact information of those you are reaching out to, so that you can connect with your audience at any time you want and don’t have to hope for them to see your content.
3. Join content-related webinars and groups to make a lot of sales in a short period of time, while simultaneously growing your email list and creating new content.
4. Measure you growth per purchase as you advertise, so you can know your audience interest and how to maximize it.

Basic Promotion Methods for Affiliates

There are various promotion methods for affiliates which is dependent on the platform on which the affiliate what to use to promote such products and services. Since the promotion method is dependent on the platform, let’s consider the basic platforms that affiliates can use to earn commissions:

Blog: for someone with an active blog and a good number of audiences, then your blog is a great medium for your prospective customers. This can be done effective through; product feature, blog post, banners, GIFs, display advertisement and product review

Email: for an affiliate with a reasonable collection of prospective customers email address, sending emails about product, services, promotion and discounts is an effective means of promotion

Social Media Platforms: 70% of those in most countries are using one social media platform or the other, which make social media an effective way to reach out to prospective customers. Basic social media platforms affiliates can maximize are:

• 

• Facebook: through Facebook posts, Facebook story, relevant Facebook page and groups, and messenger.
• WhatApp: broadcast messages, status stories, advertising on relevant groups
• Instagram: using your page posts, status, and direct messages to targeted customers

Other platforms affiliates can optimize are: Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, YouTube, Snapchat, and many more.

Putting the platform into consideration, here are two factors we consider when choosing the medium in use to reach out to your audience:

The Audience: the type of audience we want to reach out to, their interests and size.

The Product and Service: we would not want to use a platform where people are interest in fashion trends to promote agricultural equipment. So we study our audience and be sure the product/service we are about to promote is what they would need

Hope you found this useful. Don’t forget to sign up to become an affiliate and earn up to 10% commission on each purchase made through you.