What is Affiliate Marketing?

So I piqued your interest in affiliate marketing and you’re probably like me when I first started. Wow, that sounds great, but what IS affiliate marketing? I’ve seen numerous posts about affiliate marketing on social media but I really don’t know what it is.

Affiliate marketing is promoting other businesses’ products or services (marketing) in order to receive compensation in the form of commissions (affiliate) for the sales you generate. There are four critical parts to affiliate marketing:

• Traffic Generation: Getting enough of the right people to see the offers you are promoting
• Capturing Traffic: Building a database of contacts from the traffic you generate (subscribers).
• Following Up: Following up and providing value to your subscribers to get them to know you, like you and trust you, with the ultimate goal of making sales.
• Sales System: Being selective in the products and services you offer to your subscribers. What you promote is most significant.

Your Sales Funnel will be the sales process you use to send prospects and customers through to introduce them to yourself, your business and your offers. It is comprised of multiples stages “funneling” traffic to turn them into prospects, prospects into customers and customers into repeat customers.

I want to emphasize one thing here – It’s not about you, It’s About Your Customer. If you build a sales funnel simply to sell any product to anyone so you can make money, those potential customers will see through that and either not accept your offer, or if they do, not become a repeat customer and dislike you. If you provide value to your potential customers and follow up with a valuable service after the sale, they will get to know, like and trust you, and hopefully become repeat customers. Provide them value, not just a sale.

Lastly, most affiliate marketers generate traffic via Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. While those are all great platforms to generate traffic, the problem is they are owned by someone else and they can censor you, lock you out, or even delete your account. This puts you at risk of losing everything you’ve built. The ideal method is to own your own platform on the Internet by creating your Owned Asset. This Blog is my owned asset.

That’s affiliate marketing in a nutshell. Yes, there is a big learning curve, especially for beginners like myself. That’s why I created this Blog – to help you avoid the mistakes I made and build a successful business. It took me a long time and several failed attempts to really understand affiliate marketing and I am continuing to learn. Come follow me on my journey and leverage my experiences and successes.