You are a virtual sales person of sorts. You don’t deal with inventory, customer service, follow up, or anything like that. You simply sell.
When you successfully get a customer to the business and make a sale (or lead), you get paid a commission. As an example, let’s look at Ebay.com, amazon.com, clickbank.com. clickbank.com is an online retailer. amazon wants as many sales as possible and in order to do so, will pay you a commission if you get someone to buy because of your advertisements.
So they give you a special “affiliate” link and when you have people go through your affiliate link and purchase something on the amazon website, you automatically get paid a percentage of the sale.
Now… think if you could find tens of thousands of people actively looking for physical products like phone, laptop, shoe, clothe etc.
You could be placing your special affiliate link in front of them and be making money 24 hours per day.
This is just a simple example of what affiliate marketing is and how it’s done; there is a bit more too it all, but all of it will be covered in this article. What is an Affiliate Network? You could try to go and find each individual website you want to promote, try to setup a deal with them and then become their affiliate but that would take a lot of time. This is where the affiliate networks come in.
Affiliate networks are companies that facilitate the “network” or relationship between the companies and the affiliates (you). Affiliates (Industry term: Publishers) sign up for the affiliate network and instantly have access to thousands of companies (Industry term: Advertisers) that want you (affiliates) to promote their business. You can pick through any number of these companies to promote. This instant access to hundreds or sometimes thousands of companies is the true power of being a part of an affiliate network.
But… the benefits don’t stop there. You never deal with the individual companies directly. Instead, you always deal directly with the affiliate network. This way you really only have one point of contact. Finally, the other major benefit of the affiliate network is the payment terms.
Affiliate networks usually pay their affiliate’s way faster than a direct company. Instead of waiting 60+ days to be paid (net 30 or even net 45), you can often get paid biweekly or weekly after a small earning threshold.
For example, many networks will set you on weekly wires if you start generating $1000 per week or more in commissions. So what does the affiliate network get out of all of this? In exchange for all of this, the affiliate network takes a small percentage from the commissions you generate. Don’t worry… it is well worth it!
Affiliate networks are the best places to start in your affiliate marketing career. Even to this day, I still use affiliate networks for a majority of my business because it allows me to leverage my time as best as possible.
Getting Accepted Into An Affiliate Network
It can be a bit difficult to get accepted into an affiliate network (especially for people outside the US) when first starting out. It might seem like a tough process but if you follow the steps below, you should have no problem. This tough process is due to affiliate networks taking on a ton of risk. In most cases they have to pay bigger affiliates weekly (sometimes even daily) but yet only get paid from the companies net 15 or even net 30! In some cases the companies are late or even fight payment.
If a certain percentage of leads for example are not good, then they often don't want to pay for the whole batch of leads. Risk Factor To affiliate networks it’s all about one thing. How much of a risk are you to them? Think of the network that has 1000 applications waiting for approval. Because of the shear number of scammers joining affiliate networks each day, the only way to stand out is to show them you’re not one of them. If you're an affiliate from a major country, your risk factor is substantially lower but still does not guarantee acceptance... You need to do more than JUST apply. To be Accepted... To be accepted into a network, you must get over the fear of talking to real live Human beings. Yup, that means actually calling in. I know… I hate talking on the phone probably as much or more than most of you who would rather pull teeth than talk on the phone but it’s a necessary evil. When you apply for any affiliate network, you must not sit and wait there for approval but you should call them. If you get denied, call them and ask why.
Calling a business removes a lot of the risk factor as a majority of hackers, scammers, and fake lead generators don't want to call. When you’re on the phone, the network is probably going to ask you how you plan to promote the affiliate offer, if you have any websites, etc. Some of the scammers have recently gotten smarter and have begun hiring actors to call the networks.
Therefore the networks are going to be asking your specific questions about how you plan to promote their affiliate offers. Study out one of the methods that you will learn about in this guide. Really focus on it and become confident in that single method. That way when it’s time to answer some questions about how you plan to promote the affiliate offers, you shouldn’t have a problem being accepted into the network. Application One common question you will see on the applications for the affiliate networks is what your website is. If you have ANY website, no matter how terrible, put it in. It really doesn’t matter that much in the terms of approval.
If you have no website, no worries either. Put something like Facebook.com in the website URL if you plan to promote via facebook and explain in the comments section your plans. Website or no website, explain yourself and promotion methods in the comments section on the application.
No comments:
Post a Comment