Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: What is Affiliate Marketing?

If you are reading this article, I bet you are looking for ways to make money online?

Simply, because affiliate marketing is the most popular and sustainable form when it comes to making money online. 

So what is affiliate marketing?

This article provides you with the basics of affiliate marketing.

After reading this article, you will understand affiliate marketing more clearly. As well as related terms.

Let us begin with.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing forms of marketing. The way it works is very simple. When someone buys the product you refer, you will receive a commission from the sales.

You can imagine the simple and common process of affiliate marketing as follows:

Online shoppers to your marketing website. They click on the link to introduce the product you market. They are redirected to the sales page of the company that directly sells the product. At this point, they decide to buy. And you will get a commission from the successful conversion. You can view the schema from AccessTrade

AccessTrade Affiliate Marketing Working Example

If in other business forms, you need to have a product. In addition, you also have to take care of order management, shipping, and customer care.

But with affiliate marketing, you don’t bother with that stuff. Your only task is to market the product to as many people as possible. Of course you have to try to convince them to spend money to buy the product you market.

A common question for those new to affiliate marketing:

You have successfully brought customers to the website of the company that directly sells the product. And that customer buys the product. So how does the company you market to know you helped them sell the product, and pay you a commission?

The simple answer here is to rely on a special URL. This is a link that contains a unique ID (identifier) ​​for each marketer when participating in affiliate marketing for a company. URLs help measure the amount of traffic and revenue you generate from your website or from other advertising techniques like Facebook.

This is an example of the URL that I use for affiliate marketing for A2Hosting . Notice the string of characters at the end of the URL.

This URL will be different for each A2Hosting product marketer

Now, to market A2Hosting’s hosting service, I just need to insert a link into my website. When someone clicks on this link and buys the service, A2Hosting will know that the customer bought it through its referral link. And they will reward you with a commission.

Note : If you want to participate in marketing for A2Hosting, please click here .

Affiliate marketing has 2 interesting points. Firstly, it’s the cookie storage time. For example, some programs offer a 30-day cookie storage period. That means if a customer clicks on your referral link and makes a purchase at any point within the next 30 days, you still get a commission.

The other interesting point is: you will be paid a commission when a customer buys a product that is different from the one you market.

Let me give you an example to make it easier to understand. Masoffer is currently a growing affiliate marketing platform in Vietnam. When you join this marketing network and market products of Tiki, a leading e-commerce site in Vietnam. Customers click on the link to introduce Tiki’s product A on your website. And they are taken to the page selling product A on Tiki. But they don’t buy that product, they buy other products. In such a case, you will still be recognized by Masoffer as usual.

Affiliate Marketing Terminology

If you are new to affiliate marketing, there are definitely a few terms you need to master.

I have compiled such terms, including English and Vietnamese

Affiliate or Publisher : can roughly be understood as marketing staff, distributors who like you and I use marketing links to advertise and sell products.

Affiliate marketplace (Marketing network, affiliate marketing platform): Affiliate marketing programs are usually organized in two forms: an independent affiliate program that is directly controlled by the company itself selling products. onion.

The other form is the marketing network where the connection between the company with the product (advertiser) and the people who do market the product (publisher). Overseas, there are some big affiliate marketing networks like ShareAsale , CJ, Clickbank . In Vietnam, there are currently two major affiliate marketing networks: AccessTrade (a member of a Japanese company) and Masoffer (a wholly Vietnamese company).

Marketing software : This is software that helps a company or marketing network create an affiliate marketing program. For example idevdirect .

Affiliate Link : Marketing link or special link as mentioned above to determine your marketing results.

2 tier affiliate marketing : This is also how you make money from an affiliate marketing program. In this case, you refer someone else to join the affiliate program. And when they have a commission, you will also get a small part of the commission from the company that provides the marketing program.

Link Cloaking (Cover or hide affiliate marketing): Affiliate marketing looks very bad. Besides, some people may not like to buy through affiliate marketing. Therefore, you can use the technique of Link Cloaking to turn marketing links into a shorter, more eye-catching form. If you are using WordPress, ThirstyAffiliates is a popular plugin that helps to create nice neat marketing links.

Custom coupon Many affiliate programs have the ability to generate their own discount codes. In other words you can name the discount code as you like. This helps you increase sales. For example, when I join affiliate marketing for Stable’s hosting service, I can create my own 40% discount code as shown below.

First Click : When a user clicks on your link, but they don’t make a purchase right away. Days later they accidentally click on someone else’s marketing link, and make a purchase. At this point, the commission is calculated for you because you are the first to click the affiliate link.

Last Click : Last click. The scenario is the same as First Click. But now the commission is charged to the affiliate whose marketing link was last clicked and converted. Masoffer is an example of a marketing platform that works on this model.

Payment Threshold : Most affiliate programs require you to meet a certain revenue threshold in order to pay. For example, participating in Masoffer, you must reach a minimum of 200k to receive payment, otherwise the revenue will accumulate to the next month.

Epilogue

This article has answered your question what is affiliate marketing. You also get an idea of ​​how affiliate marketing works.

Affiliate marketing program is one of the best ways to help companies advertise their products for free. Compared to traditional advertising, affiliate marketing obviously saves them quite a bit of product.

That is why many businesses in Vietnam are increasingly interested in affiliate marketing.

Just seeing the new marketing or campaign partners growing in AccessTrade and Masoffer makes it clear.

If you do not understand anything about affiliate marketing, leave a comment below.