The Basics of Affiliate Marketing

On the most basic level, affiliate marketing works like this: Word of mouth marketing is the most essential kind, and you are just a person talking about a product. If the way you talk about products leads to a sale or a valuable sales lead, then the manufacturer pays you.

Affiliate marketing, partnership programs, publisher agreements – the words don’t really tell you how the business works best. As a Brand X affiliate, you might imagine your role is to put on a Brand X tee shirt and adopt the Brand X corporate jargon. Yes, and no. As a partner, you might see your role as sniffing out all Brand X’s marketing initiatives and deciding where you fit into those initiatives. Yes, and no. As a publisher, you might think you need to constantly eyeball the promotional kit updates and work to spin new materials in the best, most aggressive way possible. Yes, and no. Affiliate marketing absolutely requires all those tools and tasks. But these identities are really not what’s at the heart of the affiliate role.

As an affiliate, your role is more related to the customer. Imagine that Brand X is a big walled garden. As an affiliate, you have access to peek into that garden, where helpful gardeners hand you pictures of what’s inside. Of course you, like anybody else, can buy from the garden, but they’re usually not giving you products for free. If you stand outside the garden and attract new visitors, they’ll pay you. But you are still outside the wall of the garden.

As such, your credibility, loyalty, and identity are all built and judged among the other outsiders. If you behave as though you’re an escapee from that walled garden – if you approach these outsiders as if you are not one of them – they’ll notice right away. On the other hand, if you treat your affiliation with Brand X as an opportunity to get paid for blunt honesty, promote the signal and diminish the noise, and so on – then you are serving the public. That is the role of a successful affiliate. Whether your target audience is the end consumer, or other affiliates, makes no difference here. You’re still an outsider talking to outsiders.

Too many affiliate marketers think that the world is peopled by idiots. Because of this, they think they can trick Google to sending a few idiots to a web site full of nothing, and viola, money will happen. A lot of guides exist claiming that’s a great way to make millions of dollars in affiliate marketing. To this we say, nothing ventured, nothing gained – and that formula ventures nothing.

As an affiliate, you are marketing to yourself – people with similar interests and probably similar goals and levels of intelligence. If you look at the sites that have made a success of affiliate marketing, you’ll see they are the sites that grasped that fact.