Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular forms of digital marketing today and while it benefits vendors by providing them with cheap marketing, it also provides influences with a steady stream of passive income. For example, ShareASale, a Chicago based affiliate marketer, Fiverr Affiliates Program, one of the world’s biggest marketplace for freelancers, and ClickBank, a popular marketplace for digital products.
Note: if you don’t have a website yet, I recommend you start a WordPress site.
The first step is to start your affiliate website with WordPress hosting (DreamHost is our recommendation).
Let’s get started and understand what is affiliate marketing and how does it work!
What does affiliation mean?
To better understand what affiliation or affiliate marketing is, we should start by asking ourselves: what is affiliating? The formal definition of affiliating is “to form an official connection or to become attached with an organization.”
When applied to businesses, and in this case online businesses, affiliation or affiliate marketing is an arrangement where an online seller pays the affiliate commission for sales or traffic derived from their (affiliate’s) marketing efforts.
The affiliate or publisher can be a website or social media account that promotes someone else’s products or services to their readers or followers. The requirement is for both the publisher and the seller to be internet-based.
Usually, there are four parties involved in a typical affiliation transaction. Sometimes it can be three if the affiliate deals directly with the merchant thus leaving out the network. Let’s look into them.
The merchant
This is the vendor who creates the product or buys it from a manufacturer intending to resell it to customers online. They could even be selling a service or publishing content.
Regardless of the service or product, they interact with the customers or audience directly through their website. They take orders, ship the packages, and provide after-sale services. Merchants run their marketing campaigns in which affiliate marketing forms part of the overall strategy.
The affiliate
Affiliates are usually a website or any other form of online influencer who talk about certain products or services to encourage people to buy them.
They can promote more than one product at a time. The affiliate does not handle and deliver the goods or receive payments for them. They only receive a commission for any sale or site visit that stems from their marketing efforts. They can be referred to as a publisher or marketer.
The network
The network acts as a bridge between the affiliate and the advertiser (merchant). They provide the infrastructure to administer the affiliation and usually feature products from many brands that affiliates can choose from.
The customer
They are the audience or buyer to whom the content or products are being promoted. If they buy through the affiliate, the price of the products is not higher than it should be if they went direct to the merchant. The commission is usually accounted for in the retail price.
What is affiliate marketing and how does it works
What is affiliate program?
An affiliate program is an agreement that sets up and enforces the terms of the relationship between a marketer and the merchant.
The e-commerce giant, Amazon, popularized affiliation by setting up a program in which they promised (and of course, paid) affiliates a percentage of the sales for their referral. Following the success of Amazon’s program, many other merchants decided to use this form of digital marketing to drive sales and increase the number of visitors to their sites.
Joining an affiliate program is a core move in order to understand what does affiliation means and to actually practice it. There are three most known models used by these programs to pay the marketers. Let’s explore those.
Pay per click (PPC)
In this format, the seller pays the marketer when visitors click on a link that leads them to their site. They don’t even have to buy the products. A good example of this model is AdSense by Google.
Pay per sale
In this model, the merchant pays the affiliate a commission when the visitors they bring in buy a product. The commission can be a fixed amount per sale or a percentage of the sale. The perfect example is the Amazon affiliates program.
Pay per lead
This format pays the associates for bringing in visitors who fill out their information and effectively become leads. The merchant, in this case, can either nurture the leads along their sales funnel or sell them to someone else.
Affiliate marketing definition and what is affiliating
What is an affiliate network?
As earlier described, the affiliate network acts as the intermediary between the affiliate and the merchant. They have the infrastructure to enact the agreement between the two parties and ensure that everyone gets what they want. They are also referred to as affiliate brokers. The broker provides reporting tools, tracking tools, payment processing, and a large collection of brands.
So in order to get a grasp on what is affiliating, you must join a reliable affiliate network and while affiliates (like you) sign up to the network free of charge, merchants have to pay for their products to be featured. The network benefits both the marketer and the merchant in the following ways:
Affiliating infrastructure
If a seller were to run the program themselves they would have to vet the affiliates, provide the infrastructure to track the marketer’s performance and pay them. They would also have to run a helpline for the affiliates. While big companies are capable of handling the responsibility, smaller businesses are better off outsourcing that part of the business to the brokers.
Products variety to promote
They provide affiliates with a wide range of products to choose from. As an affiliate, searching for individual brands that you intend to promote can be a tedious process. Having a wide range of options in one location simplifies the process.
Trusted payments
The merchant is guaranteed payment. In the absence of the network, affiliates have to rely on the seller to pay them for the sales they bring in. If the sellers are not trustworthy, having an enforcer meditating on the marketer’s behalf guarantees that they are paid their dues. It is an escrow of sorts.
Powerful tracking and tools
The network helps the affiliates set up their affiliate links together with the required tracking and analytical tools. Examples of affiliate networks include Amazon, Commission Junction, Clickbank, just to mention a few.
What is affiliate link?
An affiliate link is a special link that directs traffic from a marketer’s website to the advertiser’s website. An affiliate is assigned a unique URL when they successfully join the affiliate program. Each affiliate link contains information about the affiliate to help track their stats.
There are different types of affiliate links. The most common types are:
Banners
The links are anchored to banners – boxes with graphics and text which placed all over your site.
Text links
The links are anchored to text that is part of the website’s content. They look more natural than banners and appear as part of the regular site content.
Search boxes
These links enable visitors to search through the vendor’s site while browsing the affiliate’s content. The results direct visitors to the merchant’s website.
Affiliate links can direct the visitors to the merchant’s home page, specific product page, sign up page, or storefront. It depends on how the affiliate program is designed. Now you understand what is affiliate link it, it’s basically every piece of content that you have that would lead to your merchant site.
Best affiliate programs to join
With affiliate marketing, you must focus on one thing: your performance and ROI on the effort you put. Here are a number of affiliate marketing programs we suggest you try with reliable payouts and great products to promote.
Repixel.co – a new and pretty revolutionary ad network that allows you to earn money by placing retargeting pixels on your website. Earning money without displaying ads! Read or full review.
ShareASale.com – one of the world’s leading affiliate marketers. ShareASale is an affiliate marketing network based in Chicago, IL USA. ShareASale services two customer sets in affiliate marketing: the affiliate, and the merchant. Affiliates use ShareASale to find products to promote and earn a commission for referrals on those products.
Fiverr Affiliates Program – the world’s biggest marketplace for freelancers with over 12 million users in almost 200 countries. Got a generous commission plan, with CPA of up to $150. Plus, there’s no referral limit and you get lifetime attribution.
ClickBank – a popular choice among affiliate marketers with digital products in over 20 categories that reach about 200 million people all over the world.
Don’t forget, you need a personal site to start with most of the affiliate programs. If you still need to launch your affiliate website, we suggest you use DreamHost for this. A non-EIG, reliable, SSD based web hosting service.
Conclusion
There’s more to affiliation than we can fit in one article. We have established that it’s a revenue-sharing arrangement that enables sellers to target more customers and affiliates to earn passive income and it can involve three or four players depending on the arrangement.
The affiliate marketing approach is a great way to generate income and passive earning by focusing on picking the right product to promote and create great content for it. A highly motivated affiliate marketer will be able to generate a passive income without the need to worry about shipping or producing it’s own product or service because the merchant will be the one to take care of it.
Now that you understand what is affiliate program, you know it’s an elegant and smart way to generate a secondary income which is a passive one in its core that could become your main income stream from the comfort of your home.
You no longer have to work in silos with advertisers and display ads on your site in order to earn passive income. Repixel.co is a marketplace that connects you with advertisers from non-competitive companies in your industry, allowing them to retarget your website and apps at a fee and all you need is to drop an advertising pixel on your web property and get paid for the partnership.
To understanding repixelling and this Repixel review, you first need to appreciate the crucial role retargeting plays in online marketplaces.
Have you been wondering why the locations you browsed when looking for a weekend getaway keep on chasing you even across platforms such as smartphones and websites? Well, that’s retargeting at its best. A tracking pixel or cookie was loaded onto your browser that monitors your online behavior and conversions. This helps to show up advertisements that match your browsing history.
Retargeting has been an important weapon in advertisers’ arsenals for more than three decades now. The effectiveness of this technique in customer acquisition and conversion rate optimization cannot be disputed. However, retargeting in its traditional element is inherently limited to the number of visitors on your site.
Imagine the possibilities if you could stretch the expanse and retarget visitors on other websites in addition to your web property and apps!
Think of a scenario where a clothing company targets a fashion blog. The clothing company (advertiser) would have to part with some good money to place their adverting pixels to visitors on the fashion blog (site owner or publisher). This model is the backbone of repixelling.
The beauty of repixelling is that it is a win-win partnership. The advertisers’ returns on their ad dollars improve as they reach out to more qualified leads while the website and app owners get paid for their advertising space.
Think of Repixel as a marketplace that brings together advertisers and website owners or publishers. The website and app owners put up listings comprising a brief description of their business and the CPM dollar amount of their advertising space. On the other hand, advertisers review the listings posted and send a repixel request.
As the bites or requests start streaming in, site owners get an opportunity to review them and accept or reject based on whether or not the advertiser is a competitor among other factors.
The site owner has the prerogative of setting the listing price in the form of a specified number of dollars of CPM.
CPM, an abbreviation for Cost Per Mille (is the price of 1000 impressions), is an advertising model that prices advertising based on impressions. However, in the Repixel marketplace, the CPM pricing is on the basis of pageviews and not impressions (ad views).
Assume a site owner lists their advertising space for $1.50 CPM. The interpretation is that the advertiser will pay $1.50 for a thousand pageviews from the retargeted site. In repixeling, every advertiser who puts their ad on your web property pays you separately, hence a higher return.
From the example above, if you allow 25 advertisers to repixel your site and each advertiser has a daily budget of $50, you can potentially earn $1,875 calculated as $(25×50*1.50). However, this largely depends on whether your site can generate enough traffic to fill the $50 per day order.
Out of your total earnings ($1,875), Repixel takes their cut (20 per cent), leaving you with $1,500. Since the ads are from non-competitive sites and the income is purely passive, you have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain with the Repixel model.
As a site owner, your earning potential is hinged on two main parameters: the traffic to your site and the number of advertisers you managed to sign on your websites, and that what we want to emphasize at in this Repixel review.
There are several ways site owners can monetize their web properties. Unfortunately, some of these channels such as listing on ad display networks can be limited in space, time-consuming or both.
With ad display networks, such as Google AdSense, you can populate your site with ads to the extent of making it look spammy. Despite the payments you get for clicks on the ads, site visitors get driven away to other sites. This model can undermine your business goals.
By promoting affiliate products, this monetizing technique can be time-consuming, complicated to manage, and limited in scale. You can only enroll a given number of affiliates at a time.
Those are not optimal. Out goes inefficiency and limitations and in comes the endless possibilities of Repixel. The following are the specific, tangible benefits you can reap from using Repixel.co service:
Unlimited in Scale
There is no limitation as to the number of advertisers you can allow to retarget your website. The more advertisers you enroll, the higher your potential earnings. Also, you can list as many websites as you possibly can to double or triple your earnings.
Control
There is no automatic ad display on your web property. You have the opportunity to vet every repixel request from advertisers. If you deem the request inappropriate for the reason of competitiveness or any other reason, you are under no obligation to accept it.
Non-interfering
Unlike other models, Repixel doesn’t interrupt the processes running on your website, it works in the background. Assume you sell ads, or you are into affiliate promotions, repixeling won’t disrupt your monetization, instead, you’ll benefit from the incremental revenue repixeling brings.
Risk-Free Monetization
The Repixel marketplace allows you to list as many web properties as you have for any preferred duration without having to link your credit or debit card. Even when you don’t get repixel requests, you have nothing to lose because there is no investment you put prior to or during the listing.
How Do You Get Started on the Repixel Marketplace?
A central point in this Repixel review, Whether you are an advertiser or website owner, the first step you should take is to register for a Repixel account. It is important to note that Repixel can allow you to operate both as an advertiser and a site owner.
When signing up as a site owner, you’ll be prompted to fill in the following information:
The name of your site
The domain
The monthly volume of visitors to your site
Your pricing in CPM
Company logo
Short and long descriptions of your website
There is no magic in listing your web property on Repixel. The only things you need to carefully think about are your short and long descriptions. They need to represent what your site really is and draw attention from advertisers. The descriptions appear publicly.
After filling out the form, the Repixel system will prompt you to copy and paste on your website the Repixel pixel. For this, you’ll have to get to the backend or edit mode of your website, copy and paste the code snippet into the global header section. You don’t need any coding knowledge for this, just basic HTML know-how.
Repixel has a virtual wallet that allows you to accumulate your earning. With the virtual wallet, you have the option of whether to link your bank account or debit card at the beginning when signing up or when you want to cash out.
If you are registered as both advertiser and site owner, you can transfer cash from your “site owner” account to your “advertiser” account. This possibility eliminates the need to cash out and redeposit.
Example of adding your own website to Repixel.co marketplace
Useful Tips to Enhance your Repixeling Experience
It holds true in advertising as it is in general business that there is no “one size fits all” approach. You’ll have to take the square peg and whittle it down until it fits into the round hole. The following tips will give you a fighting chance in the Repixel marketplace.
Multiple Listings – Unless you have only one website, don’t limit yourself on the number of websites you can list on Repixel. List as many as you can; the more you list, the higher the chances of teaming up with the right advertisers. This can bring you massive earnings.
Search Terms – Your visibility on Repixel largely depends on the quality of your description, but most importantly the keywords you use in the content. Repixel has search functionality that advertisers use to identify potential site owners they can partner with. You should go beyond this and use premium keyword research tools to generate the right search terms for your ideal audience.
Responsiveness- How fast you respond to a repixel request can be the difference between you locking in a deal or losing out to the next site owner in line. Some advertisers make decisions on the go and a slight delay may cause them to cancel the request.
The Repixel system is designed in a way that accepting a request takes less than 60 seconds. As long as the advertiser meets the criteria, click approve to minimize the chances of them changing their mind.
Reach out to Advertisers – It is not always that advertisers will send you repixel requests. At times, you have to go forth and proactively “fish them out”. If you think your web property is a good fit for a certain group of advertisers, use the Contact form to message them.
For instance, if you have a website with lots of hotel reviews, you could reach out to a tour and travel company. In the worst-case scenario, an advertiser may choose not to respond to you, this is not unheard of; it is the game of life. You have nothing to lose, but so much to gain, especially if you get a ‘Yes’ from them.
There you go! Now you know what Repixel is, how it works, signing up for an account and putting up a listing. With the tips and nuggets of wisdom shared here in this Repixel ads marketplace review, you should be able to work your way through, list as many sites as you can, and watch as you get paid passively!
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