Part 1. Introduction to Affiliate Marketing
Hi! I'm Jaybot. I do Affiliate Marketing and I love pizza so we already have a lot in common! Right?! One of the best tracking platforms – Binom, asked me to make an intro to Affiliate Marketing video to introduce the topic. Since there still seems to be a lot of question marks surrounding it. Why me?! As I said, because I like pizza. So Binom and I also have a lot of things in common already. While I did argue that having hot girls in bikinis would probably make the videos more exciting, they said they couldn't quite squeeze it into their budget, so for now, it's just me. Anyway, I've been doing this Affiliate Marketing thing for a few years now, and I keep getting the question from people: What is Affiliate Marketing? It's taken me a long time to work it out, but I'm pretty sure it goes like this: Making lots of money online! Okay, might be a little bit vague Let’s going to some more details There's approximately a bajillion different ways to make money on the Internet.
And they all come down to: Selling The Thing to The Person = The Money That's basic sales and marketing. The actual transaction is the easy part. Convincing The Person A that The Thing B is amazing and infinitely changing their lives for the better is the slightly more challenging part. Now, for normal sales and marketing, you’ll need The Thing to sell. But what if you don't have The Thing? Well, you can make your own Thing. But that's a lot of hard work to create it, and then possibly maintain it. Or… For most Affiliate Marketing (that we'll talk about here): You don't even need to worry about having The Thing. You only need to Tell The Person about The Thing. And that is pretty much what Affiliate Marketing is: Selling Other People's The Things to The Person for them. As one famous Affiliate Marketer said: It's like Bounty Hunting.
You see: a lot of other people already have The Thing which we can call their offer, they'd like to sell more of: from paid dating sites to insurance and mortgages, solar panels, porn and online games. So, they offer a "bounty" to anyone who can persuade people to buy them. If you can sell The Offer, then you get the bounty. That's really the basics of Affiliate Marketing.
So, we're bounty hunters. Not necessarily Mandalorian, but you get the idea. However 😊 It gets even better! Like I said earlier, you don't need to sell The Thing. We can just find people who might be interested and buying The Offer. Finding people who want to buy a something is hard. But if you persuade someone to try a product for free, they're more likely to buy it later. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly easy to persuade people to try things on the Internet, even if they are free.
That's where an Affiliate comes in. As an example, many businesses are willing to pay a fee, or 'bounty', for trial registrations in other words, for getting people to sign up to a website for free. That's known as a "CPA" – or Cash Per Action"… Or Cost Per Acquisition? I've heard both. Either way, it's You getting paid for getting some Action on The Offer.
If you can make advertisements that persuade people to sign up to a website that's paying a bounty like that, you can make a lot of money. There are hundreds of examples of how to do this. But I've always liked this one Jimmy has a dating website. He gets money from his users, but he wants to make his business bigger, so he wants more new people to sign up all the time. So Jimmy offers a free trial for his cool dating site. But he still has to find potential users and persuade them to sign up.
He's busy enough running his site, so Jimmy offers a "bounty" of $3 to anyone who can persuade a user to sign up to his site. Sebastian, The Affiliate, hears about this and thinks he can persuade people to sign up to that site. But where does he get those people from? Well, that's where Natalia comes in. Natalia runs a huge advertising traffic source. A traffic source has lots of traffic for sale that anyone could upload their ads to. Basically, her site has thousands of website owners who sell advertising space on their websites to make money. Sebastian buys advertising space from Natalia, makes some great advertisements that attract the attention of Natalia's site's users, and sends people who click on those advertisements to Jimmy's dating site. Quite a bit of those people sign up to Jimmy's site, and Jimmy pays Sebastian $3 every time someone signs up. If it costs Sebastian less money to buy the advertising space from Natalia than the money he makes from the people signing up to Jimmy's site, he's got profit! Now, for our affiliate Sebastian to make good money, he's going to have convince more than 1 or 2 people a day.
To make a simple $100 a day from Jimmy's site, he's going to need to convince at least 34 people. Every day. So to do that, he's going to need a loooooot of people. Roughly speaking, you can persuade between 0.1% to 3% of the people who see an ad to click on it. After they've clicked on it, it's still only like 1% to 10% of those people who actually sign up for what you were advertising. And that's for something free. If The Offer costs money, you'll see more like 0.5% to 2% of people signing up for it; AFTER clicking through the ad. That means that for every conversion (The Person that Signed up for The Offer) that you get, you'll have shown your ad to like 50,000+ people or more! So where do we get all these people from? Traffic Sources! Are where we find all these people. And there are many, many of them. Some of the most common sources of traffic include: Running a big, successful website which you own and can put ads on.
Using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to get organic visitors from web searches to a website that you own. This basically means getting free traffic from people who are searching on google and other search engines to really get that traffic by creating lots and lots of specific content related to what you think people are searching for. For example, I can get free how to make a garden traffic by creating a blog with lots of gardening articles and tips.
The articles are good and optimates get good results or get lots of free visitors, then I can sell stuff by linking to good offers or by selling advertising space. SEO is still a very valid way of getting 'free' traffic, but it takes a lot of work and a lot of time. And Time is Money. So, we can always speed things up by paying for it 🙂 Such as: Paying the owner of a website to let you place ads on their site. Or one step further… Paying an Ad Network commonly call “Advertising traffic source” or “Traffic source” for short to let you place ads on hundreds, thousands, and bajillions of sites that they manage ads for. This can also include paying for ads within a mobile app or other software that's supported by advertising. For now, we'll focus on paying for ads. There's a lot of it out there, it can be surprisingly cheap, and if you can make more $$$ than you're spending for your traffic, you can scale up to huge revenue. Examples of specific Advrtising Traffic Sources are: Social Network Traffic like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, and even Pinterest.
Search Engine Ads Pay Per Click (PPC) like Google and Bing Pops and Push traffic like Propeller Ads and Zero Park. Pops are practically very cheap and very annoying, but they are work. Push ads are web push notifications which use subscribing. This effectively ran for some time, but they only really took off this past few years because of the enjoy platform, which uses push notification natively on mobile devices that appear as normal notifications to the user. Display and Native Ads like Taboola, Outbrain, Google display network. Anytime you are reading an article on a new site and you see the "related stories" or "ads you may like" it has some sort of related image to the article you're reading but with the text like this one ⬆ That's useful in any webs. Display ads are actually very similar to native ads the distribution of thousands of websites but they still contain old school typical banners sizes and formats, which is specific to individual sites. Email via Newsletters and Auto-responders And… Adult Traffic, which deserves its own category.
We'll get into the nitty gritty on each of these Ad types later. So, now we have a Traffic Source to get The Person to The Offer-Thing. But… how do we find The Offer-Thing? Well, you could run around the internet like a chicken with its head cut off searching for everything to sell, but that would most likely result in going crazy. You may get lucky and find an "Advertiser", or Owner of The Offer, directly.
But… that's unlikely if you're just starting out. That's where CPA Affiliate Networks come in: CPA Affiliate Networks give you access to Many Things: products, services, and offers, that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to promote. These networks have relationships with "Advertisers" and allow affiliates to send traffic to their offers. In Affiliate Marketing, the Advertiser is the person who owns the offer.
This seems silly since you're running the ads. But the owner is really advertising their product or service through the affiliate network. Anyway, the network also pays you on behalf of the Advertiser and can do that much faster – so they float payments to you and take the risk with waiting for the Advertiser to pay them. These Affiliate Networks carry offers to promote in pretty much every Vertical you can imagine. What’s a Vertical you say? The types or genre of Things we can promote. The common ones are: Sweepstakes – Enter for a Chance to Win Free Prizes! iPhones! iPads! Grocery Market Giftcards! Nutra – This includes Diet Pills, Sciatica Cures, CBD, Supplements, and other Miracle Cures Casino – Online Gambling with Virtual Slots and Other Casino Related Activities. Video On Demand (VOD) or Streaming Offers – You know, like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, PrnHub:) etc. Finance – This includes loan offers, refinance offers, and maybe insurance Crypto/FX/Trading – Get Rich with Bitcoin before everyone else! Adult – The internet was built on the horny guy vertical and it’s not going away ever — Alright! So, we can get The Thing from the Affiliate Network, and plug it into our Traffic Source to get it to The People.
We're ready to rock, right? Almost. Affiliate Marketing is also called Performance Marketing for a good reason. We gotta perform! And to do that, we need to be able to Track What we're sending to Who? How we did it? When we did it? How many times we did it? Where we got it from? Where it went to? Was it a Desktop? An iPhone? What version of Android? What browser? What time of day? How much did we pay? How much did we get paid? And tons of other variables that go into running ads on the internet.
This way we can figure out how best to sell and pre-sell our offers to The Person to make sure we get the best Return on Investment (ROI) as possible. How on Earth do we keep track of all that info? Well, that's where a Tracker comes in: A Tracker like Binom does everything above and more. Tracking is collecting every little bit of data about your campaigns. What ads users click on, what landing pages they get sent to, what placements from the traffic source may have generated these clicks, what operating systems, mobile devices, carriers, and so on the users have had and more! The Person who click on our ads get sent to our tracker. The tracking system then sends clicks either directly on to the offer for The Thing, or to our landing pages to pre-sell The Thing, based on rules where we tell the tracker what to do. The tracker’s also the key to finding the best path to a successful campaign, the tracker will help you control your traffic funnel: send traffic from source A to landing page B and redirect user to offer C.
It will help you feel bad traffic: the wrong country, the wrong operating system, the wrong devices and can save your money by sending the “bad” traffic to better offers, then they can still converse. The tracker also helps us analyze data: CTR, CR, Cost, Revenue and Profit. Without a tracker you are simply more be able to do affiliate marketing campaigns fishing lure.
It's an essential part of any affiliate's toolbars. And you will be pretty much blind without that one Locally, there are a ton of trackers to choose from now, some good, some great. Binom, Voluum, Kintura, FunnelFlux, Binom, Redtrack, Thrive, AdsBridge, Prosper202, Binom are among the most popular, modern trackers. I’m super biased, but Binom is, of course, the best self-hosted tracker on the planet. Wait, what is a self-hosted tracker? Well… There are two types of trackers are there: Cloud-Based and Self-Hosted Cloud-based trackers are a software as a service. Tracker hosted in the cloud, you never worry about servers, hosting or storage and all the data is stored by the tracker provider. FunnelFlux Pro and Voluum are two popular cloud-based trackers. It has less maintenance, has almost zero downtime and fast redirects speeds because of the cloud set up. Self-Hosted redirect speed is still quite fast and using a DNS proxy like Cloudflare and a CDN will basically bring redirected speed, but is an extra step.
However, Cloud-Based can be more expensive, since these trackers usually charge based on their moun of traffic that you send to the track. The more traffic you send, the bigger the cost will be. Cloud-Based trackers also only retain your data for a limited time. The shortest three months of data history and less you want upon your money from them the keep more storage on their servers for your data and that can give privacy.
Privacy can also be an ish you as cloud-based tracking company is touring all your data on their servers. As for self-hosted… Self-hosted trackers give you the savoring to install on your server and let you have your own hosting and server and maintain the tracker on your own. All of the tracking data is kept by you on your server, Binom is one of the biggest players in this category. Self-Hosted can be cheaper, since you open giving charge for visitors. You will pay for your own server but you never get any overage fees for too many visitors. If you are running a lot of traffic, the bigger the cost difference will be between cloud-based and self-hosted trackers. You also get the keep on your tracking data, as long as you want and no one else has exact the data. However… It is self-hosted, which means you will have a lot of power, you will have the ability to get your hands dirty and do lots of technical stuff by yourself.
Honestly, Binom support will pretty much set up and do everything for you if you wish. Binom to the installation process takes about 15 minutes and all you need to do is: (on the screen) It’s pretty amazing, if you regularly have support questions, they help on and answer in under a minute. Did I mention I like Binom. Anyway, I will get into even more detail about trackers later.
Alright! So now, we have the Traffic Source to get The Person to our Tracker to a Landing page and send to The Offer-Thing on the Affiliate Network in order to get as many conversions and profit as possible! 😊 And that’s what Affiliate Marketing is. Simple, right? Okay, it’s anything but simple, but hopefully that gives you a much better idea than you had before! I want to continue de-mystifying Affiliate Marketing, to get as many awesome people to join in on the fun as I can, so we’ll continue on with more videos in this series and delve into more details on all the moving pieces we’ve talked about so far, and how Binom, of course, will help you succeed in your Affiliate Marketing journey 😉 See you soon!
