Everything You Need to Know About Affiliate Marketing to Start Your Business.

 Affiliate marketing is a frequently mentioned term today! It is a type of marketing that allows you to earn a commission on every sale made through you after you promote products that you do not sell. Affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways to earn income online! You can earn income from affiliate marketing without needing a physical presence or investing in buying and storing products.
 One of the most famous methods of affiliate marketing is the referral link! The store owner you are promoting for gives you a trackable product link which you place on your blog or YouTube channel! Consequently, you earn a commission on every sale made when customers enter through this link.

Affiliate marketing is done in three simple steps as follows:

1. Try the product or service that you find suitable for your audience.
2. Promoting this product or service and encouraging people to take action towards it through your special link or coupon.
3. Earning a commission on every purchase made through you. 

 However, you should not underestimate this process! Affiliate marketing requires strategy and many steps which we have detailed for you in this article! Continue reading to find out!

When did affiliate marketing start? 

 The story of affiliate marketing specifically began in 1989! It was realized by American entrepreneur William J. Tobin, founder of PC Flowers & Gifts, through a program he launched called Prodigy, which became the first affiliate marketing program in history! Over time, small initiatives and companies emerged to achieve the same concept.
 Then, it transitioned to e-commerce, where merchants saw affiliate marketing as a great opportunity online! Because it brings people together from all over the world, creating the possibility of forming global business partnerships for millions of products.
 In July 1996, the world of affiliate marketing took a significant leap and experienced a revolution with the rise of Jeff Bezos, founder and owner of Amazon! After launching Amazon's affiliate marketing program to promote its products, linking product pages with marketers to earn commissions on every book sold on Amazon through the marketer.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing: 

 There is no doubt about the benefits and advantages of affiliate marketing, as it has become essential in any marketing strategy for both large and small companies! Let's explore together why affiliate marketing is important for you:

1. Saves Your Time and Money:

 As previously explained, affiliate marketing is a type of easy income that doesn't require you to invest a lot of time or money to start! Finding, storing, packaging, and shipping products is not your concern or responsibility; your responsibility is simply marketing.

2. Selling in Distant Places:

 Have you ever thought about benefiting from sales in places other than your own country? Affiliate marketing allows you to do this by reaching the largest number of users! By reaching them and marketing to them through various platforms and tools, you can increase your commission rates in places beyond your current country.

3. Higher Earnings:

 In affiliate marketing, you also benefit by blogging for your clients and creating a trust-based relationship between you and your customers. In addition to commissions, the website gets sales movement and an opportunity to reduce inventory.

4. Freedom of Choice:

 You alone decide which products or services to promote! Therefore, the choice is yours alone among multiple options and according to the audience you prefer to deal with.

5. Easy and Fast:

 Affiliate marketing is easy to learn and quick to profit from! Your earnings begin as soon as you start providing the required information about the product to customers and explaining its value and features that might make them need and purchase it.

6. Assistance from the Merchant:

 Sometimes you won't have to worry about the content and design, as the merchant or product owner may send you the promotional tools you need, whether they are images, banners, links, emails, or otherwise.

7. Infinite Number of Products:

 There is an infinite number of products from which you can earn high commissions, ranging from 20% to 70% of the product price.

8. No Need for Customer Support:

 In affiliate marketing, you don't have to support customers in any way, although it's important to be familiar with everything about the product. Customer support and care are primarily the responsibility of the company selling the product.

9. Risk-Free Growth:

Affiliate marketing allows you to earn commissions that can be significantly large, reaching up to 70% of the product price, all without any risk to you as an affiliate marketer or even to the company or online store!

Principles of Affiliate Marketing: 

 Before we delve into explaining how to successfully implement affiliate marketing, let's first explore the seven principles that govern any strategy you undertake in affiliate marketing:

1. Product Suitability for Your Audience:

 It is crucial to recommend products that are suitable for your audience. If you already have a website, store, or blog where you display your affiliate marketing products, ensure these products are specialized. For instance, it wouldn't make sense to offer your audience nutrition products alongside war games. Instead, try to specialize to avoid losing your readers.

2. Credibility:

 As an affiliate marketer, you should only recommend products you have tried to avoid losing your audience. Be honest about the information you provide regarding these products. The product might be good, but the packaging or shipping could be poor, among other possible issues your audience might face. Provide your audience with multiple options for the same product, allowing each person to choose what suits them best. However, under no circumstances should you promote a product you know nothing about, as this does not add value to your audience and might be considered deceitful. Your reputation in affiliate marketing is your most valuable asset, and risking it can be costly.

3. Your Personal Experience;

 Since you have tried the product according to the credibility principle we agreed upon, you need to highlight this. Sales in affiliate marketing increase once you tell people that you have personally tried the product. Recommending a product will be worthless if you haven't tried it yourself, as you won't know if the deal is good or bad for the customer. The best way to convince customers of a product in affiliate marketing is through your personal opinion after trying it, either via video, pictures, or blogging. Never be afraid of being completely transparent in describing the product, as this informs the person whether the product can help them or not. Additionally, they will consider you a trustworthy source in the long term and will believe you when you present them with a bigger, better product with a higher profit commission.

4. Not All That Glitters is Gold:

 Avoid excessive marketing of products with flashy banners and intrusive pop-up windows on your site that annoy customers! Instead, rely on embedding the link within your blog texts. Including links is one of the most attractive and effective means of affiliate marketing ever! Your results in converting people to the links will improve if you do it excellently! However, be cautious not to overuse link embedding, as doing it too often and in an annoying manner might irritate readers and yield the opposite results.

5. Take Your Time:

In affiliate marketing, it might take weeks initially before you get your first customer. Do not lose hope and use this time to provide content to your customers, present your offer to them, and use automated response methods to communicate with your customers faster at any time without the need for waiting and worrying.

How to Start and Succeed in Affiliate Marketing?

First: Choosing the Right Market:

 If you haven't launched your affiliate marketing project yet, the first thing you need to do is select the market you want to specialize in. Don't try to mix products as this may cause you to lose your audience; instead, specialize. In any case, these four guidelines will help you reach the market where you want to engage in affiliate marketing:

1. Products You Love: Sales through affiliate marketing do not happen overnight; it may require steps related to your marketing strategy and content marketing, such as recording reviews, writing blogs, conducting interviews, responding to comments, and other efforts. Therefore, you need to choose a product that you love and are passionate about to avoid losing interest midway.
2. Products That Solve Problems: The market, any market, is essentially a place with a group of people who have needs and others who fulfill these shared needs. Therefore, if people have a problem, you need to provide them with the solution they require. This is the pain point that people need to address quickly, and the solution here would be purchasing the product. People's needs and problems are the primary key to sales, and you should never attempt to sell a product that you do not know will add value or solve a problem for your audience, otherwise, you risk damaging your reputation.
3. Products with a Large Market: The larger the market size, the more sales options you have. However, this might increase the factor of fierce competition, so it is better to segment the market and understand the volume of people’s searches and demand for the product. Google Ads tools and Google's Keyword Planner will be helpful in this regard.
   Smart Products:
4. Smart Products: Newly innovative products may not find a customer unless you can invest well in educating people about this smart product and how it will make their lives easier if they buy it.

Second: Choosing the Product: 

 Now that you have decided on the market in which you will operate, it is time to determine which products you will sell. Many affiliate marketers choose products with higher commissions, and while this is very tempting, it is not always the best option. You should select the product that is most beneficial to the buyer and most in demand. These four points will help you easily choose the right products:

1. Expensive or Cheap Products?
When it comes to earning profits from affiliate marketing, you have two strategies for choosing products:

• Low-priced products with high sales volume.
• High-priced products with limited sales. 

 You know best which option suits you, but we recommend the second choice due to the numerical advantages. For example, imagine you sell a product worth 200 euros with a 50% commission per sale. With each sale, you earn 100 euros. On the other hand, for a product worth 10 euros with the same commission rate, you would earn only 5 euros per sale. Thus, you would need 20 buyers to achieve the same amount as the high-priced product.

2. Most Demanded Products:
 You can conduct thorough research and comprehensive analyses of the most searched and demanded products using Google Trends or the Keyword Planner to understand which paths to take.

3. Products That Can Be Written About:
 Attracting customers in affiliate marketing heavily relies on content. Therefore, when choosing products, try to select those you can provide extensive and substantial content about.

Third: Which Affiliate Companies Will You Collaborate With? 

 Remember what we previously mentioned: focus on successful markets and products! After that, you need to decide which affiliate marketing platforms to collaborate with. Here are your different options:

• Affiliate Marketing with Amazon: Amazon is a global commerce giant and one of the most famous and largest affiliate marketing platforms in the world! In recent years, it has established a strong presence in the Arab world, especially in the Gulf region and Egypt. To start, we recommend researching which products are best-sellers before you begin affiliate marketing on Amazon.
• Affiliate Marketing with ClickBank: ClickBank is one of the largest and most well-known affiliate marketing platforms globally, offering a variety of products to promote. ClickBank allows you to see the number of affiliate marketers who sold a particular product in the past three months. This is very important for understanding the best-selling items and the competition level for these products.
• Affiliate Marketing with Commission Junction Affiliate: Commission Junction is one of the largest affiliate marketing companies in the world and ClickBank's biggest competitor. The platform has gained extensive global trust through its long experience and commitment to both companies and affiliate marketers. Additionally, it offers a wide range of products.
• Affiliate Marketing with eBay Affiliate: eBay's affiliate marketing is Amazon Affiliate's strongest and biggest competitor! Despite its global fame, the site is not very popular in the Arab world, even though it offers millions of products that you can sell through it.

Fourth: Affiliate Marketing Strategies: 

 Thinking about selling a product through affiliate marketing can be overwhelming and anxiety-inducing. Don't worry; start working on these different platforms to succeed in selling! The first thing you need to do on any of these platforms is to build your brand and establish a foundation of trust between you and the customers you market to.
A successful start might be to create your website. The importance of having a website lies in its proven effectiveness in increasing conversion rates and sales. Here are some options for promoting a product through affiliate marketing:

• Create a Blog: Creating a blog is an indispensable foundation when working in affiliate marketing. By providing content, you serve your readers and help your customers find you through search engines when they search for what they need. This generates heavy traffic on the site, enabling you to increase sales without limits.
• Use Social Media: Today, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others have become excellent platforms for selling, promoting, and introducing your products by sharing links and creating engaging content that showcases the product's value to customers.
• YouTube Channel: Using YouTube is a great, even excellent, method for affiliate marketing, as it can be a reference for those looking for specific products like electronics or furniture. It is an effective strategy for promoting products as an affiliate marketer.
• Email Marketing: You have likely heard a lot about email marketing and may have wondered about its effectiveness. Email marketing is highly effective and suitable for affiliate marketing. Moreover, it is extremely economical compared to the profit return achieved from it.
• Use Paid Ads: You should not spend on ads unless you have a plan. Nevertheless, paid ads can be an excellent option if you execute them according to a specific marketing strategy that focuses on precise targeting of your customers based on their needs for the product.

Examples of Affiliate Marketing: 

 Now that you have a clear understanding of affiliate marketing, here are some examples of affiliate marketing:

• Using Promotional Banners: This example is the simplest and most direct form of affiliate marketing for promoting products. Whether you have a blog or a personal website, you can promote as an affiliate marketer by using banners on your site to direct people to them or directly to the merchant’s page.
• Embedding or Adding Links in Your Blogs: The second method for promoting products or services in affiliate marketing is embedding links within your content. This works excellently because you provide value to the reader through this content.
• Embedding Links in YouTube Videos: The third method for promoting products or services in affiliate marketing is embedding product links below your YouTube reviews. Since people love watching product reviews and unboxings, including links in your channel description will be effective in driving people to the product, along with excellent and honest content for your audience about the product.
• Social Media: The fourth method for promoting products or services in affiliate marketing is embedding product links in posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media platforms. Additionally, using stories and the "swipe up" feature can effectively drive people to the products.