What separates good content from great content is the willingness to take risks and push the envelope
– Brain Halligan, CEO and Co-Founder HubSpot.
What makes content great is the writer’s ability to transform words into art.
Basics of marketing
Marketing refers to the process in which you interest potential buyers often referred to as customers to buy the product or service that you are marketing. Marketing is a long process, some of these steps are –
Researching
Selling
Promoting
Distributing
When we market a product/ service we are also creating a brand. We are setting the tone of the brand the kind of messaging that will be associated with that particular brand. One common way of doing this is by creating a unique identity of the brand. For example – why do you choose to buy an X product as opposed to Y? Does the messaging appeal to you, do the ingredients? Does it have a sense of uniqueness to it? There are many things to consider when marketing a brand, first you must meet the ISO brand standards then you must choose the path that sets you apart from the competition and what market the product accordingly.
History of marketing
It’s very difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when marketing first began. Some people believe that marketing as a means of selling your product existed right from the times of ancient civilizations. It could be possible that during the era of barter systems, traders came up with fun and unique ways of selling their products in exchange for their products. They could have possibly used the tools at their disposal to make their product stand apart. China and India were the first ones who came up with innovative ways and methods to sell their products to others. Their methods were conventional and not recognized as marketing then, but it’s believed that that is where the idea of marketing began to develop.
The 18th and 19th century, people saw a period of rapid social change. The driving factors for this service change was technology and scientific innovation.
What is affiliate marketing?
With the advent of technology, came new marketing trends that have gained popularity. Affiliate marketing is a relatively new form of marketing where businesses pay a commission on conversions through links provided by the brand.
Affiliates are freelancers who don’t own stock, they don’t have to deal with customer complaints or have a fixed number of customers to meet in order to get paid. Affiliates get paid every time a customer clicks on their link and buys a product or service that they advertised.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Unlike conventional marketing methods where there are many process that you need to undergo before going public with your brand, here there are only 2 parties involved these are :-
Affiliate – Affiliates are marketers who promote a brands content on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter which then ultimately drives potential customers to the product. Affiliates get paid in commission when their advertisement is turned into a sale.
Gone are the days when advertising was done only through print media. With the advent of technology, more people are spending time online and are hence more prone to seeing an advertisement on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, than television or on the radio. A reason why this form of marketing is gaining more and more popularity is due to it’s inexpensiveness. The merchant isn’t advertising the product, you are advertising a merchants product in return for a commission that’s charged by you. Television advertisements typically run for lakhs even crores of rupees for a simple 30 secs ad. Paying commission to affiliates is much more convenient.
Customers these days are a lot more informed than they were 50 years ago. Today’s customer read product reviews, talks to people before making a decision. What makes affiliate marketing interesting is the fact that affiliates have the opportunity to reach as many customers as they can through their content and then turning it into an effective sale. Research has shown that a referred customer is 4 times more likely to talk about a particular brand and has a 37% higher conversion rate.
As an affiliate, there are many ways, many tools that you can use to promote your or your merchants products. Some of these products are –
Social Media – Suggestive of the name, social media refers to various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc to market a product. This is one of the most popular tools that’s used by marketers these days.
PPC –If you’ve ever made a search online, you must’ve noticed the first 2-3 links that pop up, more often than not, a brand pays the search engine platform to buy that ad space. Every time you click on an advertisement that you see online, the advertiser pays for that click. This is a way for advertisers to advertise their products when someone organically searches for a product that’s relatable.
SEO – SEO or Search Engine Optimization refers to the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of your product and increasing your website traffic to gain more customers through both paid and non-paid organic or inorganic search engine results.
Content Marketing – Content Marketing is focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant content that’s consistent to attract and retain a clearly defined audience who will then ultimately drive your customers towards making a purchase or a profitable customer action.
Key pointers to remember when using affiliate marketing
With growing popularity, affiliate marketing is a highly competitive market wherein to be successful you have to do some studying about what works for you and what doesn’t. Here are a few points to remember and work on before becoming an affiliate and promoting a marketers content –
Creating content that generates revenue – When you start working on something new, I’m sure you are going to be super excited and this excitement to post something, anything may or may not work. Good content comes from when you strategize and devise a plan that works best for you and your brand. Randomly placing links in the article isn’t going to help anyone. If you really want your content to help generate sales, then focus on who your target audience is. As long as your content reaches the right target audience, the sales will come.
Incorporate your products in the content – What is the content that you want to put across your platform? Who is your target audience and what is their problem that you would want to solve? Once you have all these answers, you can move on to doing your research. Do keyword research and once you have your content ideas it’s time to start inserting affiliate links into your content. The benefit of doing this is that your links will be specific to the content that you want to promote.
Turning visitors into affiliate customers – When you identify which content campaign of yours has the most traction , you can focus on either promoting that or creating more content that’s similar to that. A lot of beginners assume that in order to generate high sales, you need to promote each and every post with the same amount of money but this isn’t true. Experiment with your content, observe and make use of tools like CPC, SEO and turn them into your advantage.
Different affiliate marketing platforms
Now that you know what affiliate marketing is, let’s talk about how to become an affiliate marketer. There are many platforms that are available for you to join online. These platforms have various commissions for their marketers depending on the product they choose to advertise and the platform they choose to operate it from. Some affiliate marketing platforms are –
Reseller Club – Reseller clubs is one of the largest reseller hosting sites in India. Here you can choose from a wide range of hosting products which is created for web developers and web designers. Earn anywhere between 2,000-8,000 rupees per referral. A referral is a link which has a time validity such as 60 days. This link keeps a track of all the sales which were made by you in the past 60 months.
Flipkart Affiliate –As one of the largest e-commerce platforms in India, flipkart provides its affiliates with a variety of tools such as banners, APIs for listings on Flipkart, widgets. All these products will help you promote Flipkarts deals/ platforms on their own site/app. An affiliate can earn a commission anywhere between 6-20% based on the category of their choice. You can track your referral links and conversions with real-time reports.
Amazon Associates – Amazon is the largest e-commerce brand in the world. Becoming an amazon affiliate is easy, all you have to do is sign up using your existing amazon account. Customise your links by adding pictures which can help elevate your sale. Amazon affiliates earn anywhere between 0.2% to 10% based on the kind of product they’re marketing. A huge advantage of being an Amazon affiliate is, if a customer opens your link and is then taken to another product through your link, you will still get a commission on that product purchase because it was your link that helped make that purchase.
vCommission – As one of the oldest affiliate networks in India, vCommission is working with some leading e-commerce websites such as Myntra, Snapdeal and AliExpress with a strong affiliate base of over 18,000+ and has more than 14,000 publishers making it also India’s largest affiliate network platform in India. As a vCommission affiliate you can earn a commission anywhere between 5,000-100 $. To be eligible for this platform, your content needs to be written only in English.
BigRock Affiliate –BigRock is one of India’s leading web hosting and domain registration company. As an affiliate earn a commission that’s anywhere between Rs. 30 and can go upto 30% on each sale. Apart from domain registration, you can use the platform for email hostings, digital certificates, and website buildings.
Yatra Affiliate – You may have heard of yatra as one of India’s e-commerce travel companies. Plan your entire trip from travel to hotel rooms. Commission for affiliate marketers is given upon paid bookings.
In Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is a great way for you to earn some side income whilst staying at home. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that there are many tools at your disposal and so you can be as creative as you want to, to market a product/service of your choice.
From the 1-st of February 2021, an indirect commission will pay 1.5% irrespective of the category. These changes apply to traffic referred to Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it, and Amazon.es.
As an alternative to being able to earn more commissions with these changes, Amazon has expanded the number of product categories that include commission tiers. If the traffic that you send to Amazon results in sales that exceed the first tier, you can earn higher commission rates, not only on sales beyond the initial tier but on all sales that you generate in a product category.
An example of how this all works
Below are a few scenarios that describe how the changes may, or may not, affect you.
Scenario 1: Let’s say that you are a fashion-focused publisher who doesn’t generate a lot of sales on Amazon, but the vast majority of your earnings result from purchases in product categories related to fashion. If you do nothing, you will likely earn a 10% commission (where your affiliate links to fashion products result in a purchase in the fashion category).
Scenario 2: Let’s consider the same scenario as above, but you *do* generate lots of sales. In this case, if the total qualifying revenue that you generate in fashion (where your affiliate links to a fashion products result in a purchase in the fashion category) is equal to or greater than £15,000 in a calendar month, you could earn 12% commission on *all* of the fashion sales that result from your content (where your affiliate links to a fashion products result in a purchase in the fashion category).
Scenario 3: Now let’s say that you send most of your clicks to pages other than product detail pages. For example, you send most of your traffic to Amazon’s homepage. In this scenario, if you don’t change your linking strategy (and potentially your content strategy too), you would likely see your earnings decrease as you would receive a commission of 1.5%, in most product categories.
Be sure to plan your affiliate store’s expansion or acquisition plans, accordingly. Check it out for the official Amazon statement.
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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