What is Affiliate Marketing? And how does an influencer fit in?

In the search for easy money, a lot of people come across something called affiliate marketing.
But what is affiliate marketing and how does an influencer fit in?

Imagine you own a company and you want to increase your sales for a particular product.
You can increase spending on your marketing activities.
But as said in an earlier post, advertising costs money.
And although the big companies can spend insane amounts of money, most small or starting companies cannot.

Enter Affiliate marketing.
With traditional marketing you have to spend a lot of money in advance and hope that you’ll get some return on your investment.

Whereas with Affiliate marketing you only spend money on marketing, the moment the affiliate actually generates revenue.

This is how it works:
You go to a site like clickbank, which is nothing more than a database with links to products you can sell (as an affiliate).

After you’ve gone through the whole sign up process you’ll get a link with an unique identifier.
This identifier connects any sale that comes through from that link to your affiliate account.

And you get paid a commission per sale you make.

The problem is, as it is with private label and all other so called easy ways to make a quick buck, how do you get people to click on the link and buy the product?

You of course need to build a webpage (lead page) and you basically will try and collect  an email address of that prospective customer.
Why you need to collect an email address first?
Because it very rarely happens that people buy on the spot.

And  what most affiliates do, is they create an E-book, which people get send by email if they sign up for your mailing.
In this case, the free E-book is the hook.
What an affiliate needs to do next is set up a tailored email marketing campaign, which is called a phunnel.
To build this phunnel you can use mailchimp, but I would recommend a program like convertkit or active campaign, as these programs are a lot more versatile than mailchimp.

Now throughout this phunnel you’ll try and convince people to buy the product you’re promoting.
And you really have to do a lot of A/B split tests, to see what messaging connects best  as well as frequency and timeslots.

In case you don’t know, an A/B splittest is basically where you test out variations of, for instance an email and measure which email gets the best results.

And it is a tedious, but necessary part of doing any form of marketing

Now how does an influencer fit in to all this, you ask?
Well, the big underlying need an affiliate fulfils, is reaching a certain demographic … or audience, whichever you prefer.

And this is where influencers come into play.
An influencer is essentially a person, generally speaking on social media (Instagram mostly) who leads a lifestyle that connects well with a certain brand.
So let’s say a young person who travels around the world and has over a million followers is hugely interesting for a company like Northface.
Much less so for Adidas soccer shoes.

Now there are some, who demand some form of direct payment for their services, but the majority make their living by connecting a product to their audience and earn a commission on any confirmed sale

So essentially they are in a way, the next step for affiliate marketing

Because let’s face it:
People are more likely going to buy something from someone they know and follow already, over someone who has a single page with an e-book

And I might sound like a broken record here.
But in order to build a following, you either spend money, or have to be patient and do a lot of work in advance, hoping it will pay out some day.

Now we mostly promote online arbitrage on Amazon, simply because it is something through which you can build capital fast.
It isn’t easy to make money doing arbitrage and we offer help in the way of an arbitrage program