Making money without really working is a dream shared by many people. Some people think that it is (still) possible to get there thanks to the good old technique of affiliation. Myth or reality? The Factory of the Net gives you its opinion on the question. But before, we will first remember what the affiliation is and how it works for those who are not yet very familiar with this audience monetization technique. You will be explained at the end of the article how to get started in 4-step affiliation.
Affiliation, a technique of monetization old and always effective
Affiliation is a fairly old technique that allows publishers to monetize their audience and merchants to sell more products without taking any risk. Yes, when you are a publisher, you can earn money with your affiliation without having to work a lot … as long as you have worked very well at the start. One such example of a top performing amazon affiliate site is bestviva.net which reviews various products and gives detailed guide to its readers.
Simple and complete definition of affiliation
Affiliation is a fairly old marketing technique that allows advertisers / merchants to sell more products or services, and website publishers to monetize their audience. It is a technique that, despite its effectiveness, remains unknown to many publishers. It’s a shame, because it’s missing out on a revenue stream at your fingertips when you have an audience.
If affiliation is a digital marketing technique, the principle is very innovative and has existed offline for decades. In its simplest form, the marketing affiliation involves three components:
- A merchant (also called an advertiser) who wants to sell a product or service.
- An affiliate, that is, a website publisher who wishes to offer this product or service to their audience.
- A product or service.
The affiliate offers on its website a link that refers to the merchant’s landing page (page that allows you to buy the product or service). This link can be textual or can take the form of a banner. Whenever a site visitor clicks on the link and buys the product / service, the affiliate receives a commission from the merchant. A commission proportional to the price of the product. The affiliate link has a particular form that allows the merchant to identify visitors to the landing page who clicked on the link, and therefore to know the number of sales made through the partner publisher. The principle of affiliation is as old as the world. The affiliate can basically be compared to the salesman who receives commissions on the products or services he sells.
For a publisher, the revenue generated by affiliation is calculated using several small equations. First of all, you have to calculate the number of referring visitors, that is to say the number of visitors to the site who clicked on the affiliate link (s) displayed on the site. Number of referring visitors = Total visitors x click rate on affiliate links. To calculate the referring revenue, ie the merchant revenue generated by the partner publisher, the equation is: number of referring visitors x conversion rate x average purchase price. The conversion rate here refers to the percentage of referring visitors who buys from the merchant’s site. The publisher who wishes to calculate his affiliation income must multiply the referring income by the commission rate negotiated with the merchant:
These calculations make it possible to identify the keys to the success of an affiliate program from the publisher’s point of view. The affiliation will generate more revenue for the publisher as its audience is large in volume, the rate of clicks on affiliate links is important, the conversion rate of referring visitors is high and the commission is interesting. Of course, income also depends on the price of the product or service in question. These success factors depend to a large extent on the relevance of the product / service that the publisher proposes to his audience (the “product / audience fit”). If you are the publisher of a travel site, you are more interested in offering affiliate travel offers than baby diaper deals.
For the merchants (or advertisers), the affiliation has many advantages also to the extent that the risk is minimum. They pay the commission only in case of purchases that is to say if the lead converts. The ROI is therefore necessarily positive. There is also a lead payment model (cost per click), but it is very small. In the latter case, the merchant pays money to the publisher with each click on the affiliate link. Affiliation is also interesting from the point of view of the publisher – the one that interests us in this article. Affiliation allows you to monetize your audience in a fairly simple way and without much work.