03/01/2022
Affiliate Marketing: What it really is
Have you ever been to a market and while looking around, a guy who doesn’t look like he has a shop approaches you to ask what you want to buy, he claims he has what you are looking for and proceeds to take you to his shop which may or may not be some distance away….
You get there and another person attends you.
It appears that the guy was just the middleman.
He will get paid a commission–a percentage of the price of the product you purchased.
This is to reward and incentivise him to bring more customers.
That’s affiliate marketing in its basic form.
Affiliate marketing simply means getting rewarded when a prospect or customer takes a desired action. It can be in form of clicking a link or, downloading a file, filling a survey or signing up to a website, or even making a purchase.
However, the common thing is that all these processes are done online.
Also, every party benefits in the sense that;
1) The customer gets the product easily
2) The company sells its product easily
3) The Affiliate/Middle man gets paid easily.
This means that affiliate marketing is a sure way to turn online attention to money or even make money online.
This is the same as realtors helping landlords find tenants, and then get paid an “agency fee”.
Same business, different names. Simply put, an affiliate is a middleman that helps a company reach a buyer and sell more of the product without the company needing to spend money on adverts.
So as an affiliate, you make money–commissions without even needing to have your own product or service. (Commissions are either a fixed amount e.g. $10 for foreign companies, or 30% of the signup fee, etc.)
And you can do this from anywhere in the world, from the comfort of your home, office, etc.
As long as you have an internet-connected device, you can make money from anywhere.
You make money by being the middleman for other people’s products and services.
Whether you are a stay-at-home mom or dad, undergraduate, recently finished NYSC, or simply looking to start a side hustle, affiliate marketing is the ultimate side income business.