Affiliate marketing is a popular and effective strategy for increasing conversions, driving sales, and making a passive income online. For you to make it a successful side hustle it’s important to know how it works. Learn how you can use it to your advantage, and how to make it a stable stream of income. 

In this blog, you will learn everything you need to know about affiliate marketing, the benefits, and some tips to help you get started. Affiliate marketing for beginners can be overwhelming. But with the right guide and recommendations for the best affiliate programs out there, you’ll be able to learn this pretty quickly. 

What Is An Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting another company’s product or service in exchange for a commission on sales generated. Commissions are usually a percentage of the sale price, but they can sometimes be a flat fee.

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is a method in which a business pays affiliates a fee on purchases made through their recommendations.

Parties Involved in an Affiliate Program

Sellers – this party is the company that sells the product or service you are advertising. Merchants or retailers can be small, medium, or large companies. 

Affiliates – also known as advertisers promoting the products that the merchant is selling. They market the products via a unique affiliate link on social media, websites, or anyplace else they can display their link. 

Customers – are those who purchase the products or services via the affiliate’s referral link. 

How Do The Affiliate Marketing Programs Work?

Affiliate marketing is essentially a kind of profit-sharing between merchants and advertisers. Social media affiliate marketing and other promotional methods are used by affiliates to sell products and services, and they earn a percentage of the sales they lead to merchants.

This model helps merchants boost their sales with little cost to them. It’s a win-win situation for both parties. 

Affiliate marketing programs generate a unique link and assign them to the affiliates who joined the program. Customers who click on the link store a cookie on their browsers. This helps the merchant to attribute the sale properly.

The merchant usually assigns a cookie period to determine how long a sale can be attributed to that affiliate. For example, the merchant assigns a 3-month cookie period for its affiliate program. The sale will still be attributed to the owner of the affiliate link if the customer clicks the affiliate link this month and makes a purchase next month.

However if the customer clicks two different links and makes a purchase a week later, then the affiliate who is the owner of the last link will be attributed the commission. 

Here is an example of an Amazon affiliate link:

How Much Money Can An Affiliate Marketer Make?

There is no limit to the commission that can be earned from affiliate marketing programs. Every business is different, and there are numerous factors to consider when determining affiliate compensation rates. Merchants will work depending on the budget, industry niche, and program.

Many businesses use affiliates to help them market their products and/or services. HubSpot is an excellent example of this. It frequently has higher rates than other affiliate programs. 

It is important to read carefully the terms and conditions of the affiliate program. This is so that you are well aware of how it works, how much commission you can earn, and other parameters of the program. 

Top 5 Best Affiliate Programs 

Here are the top best affiliate marketing programs that offer the highest commissions.

1. Refersion – Refersion is a platform that allows e-commerce store owners to reward their consumers for advertising their products or services. Affiliate commission is recurring over the lifetime of the subscription, as long as the customer remains active on a direct-billed plan with Refersion. $100 flat rate affiliate commission for any Shopify billed merchants, once the merchant has spent 60 days on the platform. 15% recurring commission for any non-Shopify billed merchants. If a Shopify-billed merchant upgrades to the Enterprise plan, you will then receive a 15% recurring commission over the lifetime of the subscription.

2. Canva – Canva is a popular graphic design tool among beginners, and its affiliate program is one of the finest for newcomers. Not only is it free to join, but there are no minimum sales requirements. It’s great for design influencers or bloggers who work in the design industry.
3. Convertkit – Influencers and bloggers that understand the importance of email marketing and have audiences who would be interested in joining up for an email marketing platform should look into ConvertKit’s affiliate program. One of the good things about the ConvertKit affiliate program is the recurring approach. This means you’ll get the predetermined commission per month for the duration of the referral’s ConvertKit account’s active status. For example, if you assist ConvertKit in getting 10 accounts on its cheapest monthly plan, you can earn nearly $90 per month.
4. Hubspot – HubSpot is a well-known CRM platform. The income potential is enormous, as their programs range from $50 to more than $3,000 each month. One of the benefits of its program is that affiliates can select whether to receive a recurring commission or a flat payment. Furthermore, there are no minimum sales criteria.
5. Hostgator – Partnering with HostGator is a win-win: they get more business, and you get more cash. And to make your side of things incredibly easy, they spent a couple of decades building up a reputation that speaks for itself. On top of that, a partnership with Hostgator means enjoying a generous pay structure. For example, let’s say you were to send 21 signups our way in a given month. Taking a look at the chart on the right, that’s $125 x 21… equaling a whopping $2625! Not too shabby for just displaying an ad on your site.

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