Let’s begin at the very basic level. What is an affiliate?
An affiliate is someone who helps to promote someone else’s product or service, and in return for sending referrals, they receive a commission.
There are two ways to look at affiliate marketing. You can affiliate for other people and you can have others affiliate for you.
Affiliate = Referral
Let’s look at you being the affiliate.
Affiliating For Others
Say you are using a product or a service that you love. For instance, I use Bluehost for my website hosting. I think they’re really great. I have very little down time on all of my websites, I find the back end set up really easy to navigate, and their customer service is friendly and available. Great. I want to tell others to use Bluehost too. I can do that out of the goodness of my own heart, but Bluehost WANTS me to tell lots of people about them, so they get more customers. So they have an affiliate program.
By joining their affiliate program, and using a special tracking link to send people to their site, I can earn a great commission if someone I refer to Bluehost purchases the service.
In fact, Bluehost’s commission is one of the highest I’ve seen, at $65 per referral. Considering it only costs $100+ for my hosting each year, I only need to refer two people each year to effectively get free hosting through Bluehost. Worth it? For sure!
All I have to do is run some social media posts or a write some blog posts, or even just put a click-through ad on my website. All of these things get connected to my affiliate link and anyone who visits their site and purchases their hosting service, will be connected to me and credited to my affiliate account.
So that’s easy enough for a product or service. Think about all of the products and services you are using in your business.
If you are using them, you obviously think a lot of them. You would probably recommend them to people anyway. Check to see if they have affiliate programs, and sign up.
Anytime you talk about them in your content, just make sure to use your affiliate link and you will be earning commission in no time.
The same thing can be done with people. Your clients, your colleagues, your strategic partners … whoever you want to ‘affiliate’ yourself with.
If they have an affiliate program, why not sign up?
It’s as simple as setting up the same things as you would for the Bluehost example above. Write a blog post, send an email, write some social media posts or even get an image to put on your website or blog. You will be surprised at how much you can earn by recommending people through their affiliate links.
Now a word of caution – you want to be kind to your audience always. You don’t want to bombard them with affiliate links and marketing messages for other people. But what I’m saying is if you are going to share things that you would recommend otherwise, then there is no harm in doing it with an affiliate link.
The use of a ‘disclaimer’ is becoming more popular – so that you become transparent and tell people that you are using an affiliate link before they click.
For instance, the one on my newsletter says,
BTW, some of the recommendations I make for my colleagues and clients and their products and programs have affiliate links associated with them, which means that if you purchase I may earn a commission … but the truth is I would recommend them even if there wasn’t a commission involved (and sometimes I do!). I hope you enjoy!
It’s not necessary to include a big paragraph each time you use an affiliate link, you can even just put (affiliate link) in brackets beside the link if you like. You don’t even have to indicate that it’s an affiliate link, but it seems to be a common trend for people to indicate that they are not trying to fool you into clicking the link without knowing that you may earn a commission.
So look at some of the products and services that you think your audience may be interested in, and see if they have an affiliate program!