Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way of passive income in which you promote products of other people to get a passive income. This can be done through an affiliate network or direct contact with the product owner. As an affiliate marketer, you will promote other people’s products and will get a commission in return if a purchase takes place.
What are the components of affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing has three main components (the publishers, the advertiser, and the consumer). Many people including Wikipedia have mentioned four components of affiliate marketing, the fourth component they talk about is the affiliate network. However, the presence of an affiliate network is not a must (in case you take direct affiliation from the product owner) and can be done without it. Now let’s dig into the detail of these terms.
The advertiser
This is the owner of the product. May product owners such as Blue Host, Site Ground, Amazon, etc offer direct affiliation and there is no need to take part in their affiliate program via a network. Choosing the right affiliate program depends on the niche of your content. If you are writing about websites then you will have to take part in affiliate programs of web hosting companies, AWS, Cpanel, etc. But if you write about medicines, then you will have to take part in the affiliate programs of pharmaceutical companies. So this advertiser is different for different people. You will have to think about what products you can promote the best and then you will have to choose the one about which you can write some articles.
The Publisher
This is the promoter of the product. In online affiliate marketing, it’s the owner of a blog or website. This component may also be referred to as “The Affiliate”. This can be an individual blog owner or a complete company. The profit of affiliate marketing ranges from a few hundred dollars to millions of dollars. The greater the publisher’s convincing ability, to convince a person to buy the product, the greater the income. The publisher usually promotes the products by running a review of the product and comparing it with other products. Here the trust of the visitors matters a lot. A person providing a biased review will once convince someone to buy the product but this is not good for lifetime revenue. So the review must be fair and based on facts.
The consumer
This is the most important component of the online affiliate marketing model. This is the actual investment of money, the owner of the product. If the consumer does not buy something then the system stops. Without sales taking place, no revenue can be generated either by the publisher or the advertiser.
The Network
As I told you earlier, this component is not a must but its presence ensures the smooth operation of affiliate marketing. It acts as the marketplace where publishers and advertisers meet each other. This may also be considered as the interface between the advertiser and the publisher. In such cases, the network does not list a single item but it is a collection of a large number of products. The publisher chooses the right product which is best suited for his blog or website.
