Many of you may have actively fantasized about making money online while living the life you really want. Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular and successful methods of doing this. 

With affiliate marketing, you can generate a significant income stream from your website, blog, or social channels.

What Exactly Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a method of making a commission by promo-ing various companies to your audience. You’ll choose Advertisers you love, promote them to your potential customers and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make. On the simplest level, affiliate marketing allows you to collaborate on the marketing for your favorite Advertisers, services & products, resulting in a profit-share when someone buys. That said, with affiliate marketing, you always choose which products and Advertisers to promote. You always maintain full control of what and how you promote.

Affiliate marketing is a win-win situation where you get paid to help people find relevant items they need and your favorite Advertisers get to reach audiences they otherwise wouldn’t.  Even better, once your audience clicks your affiliate link to check out a product you’ve recommended, you get a commission on all their purchases sitewide for the next several weeks.

Who is Involved In Affiliate Marketing?

There are four parties involved with affiliate marketing. Each has an important role, and each supports the outcome in an important way.

• The Advertiser – known also as the brand, vendor, or merchant. This is the party who creates and & sells the product. Can be big or small. Popular ArabClicks Advertisers include Noon, Emirates, GroupOn Tajawal, Sprii, Sivvi and Faces. 
  
  
• The Affiliate – sometimes called the publisher or the influencer, this is the party who promotes the product/service for the Advertiser. 
  
  
• The Customer – This is the end user, the party that purchases the product online, and in many ways the most important party in affiliate marketing. Without sales, there is no income to be shared, so neither the Advertiser or Affiliate make a profit. 
  
  
• The Network is the party who manages the affiliate/advertiser relationship. ArabClicks as an affiliate network, provides a list of Advertisers to choose from, supplies the Affiliate tracking link and reports on tracked purchases and commissions. 
  The ArabClicks Network also provides a great deal of other resources to affiliates such as exclusive coupon codes, responsive Arabic/English account support and in-depth trainings and guides on everything Affiliates need to succeed.

How Much $$$ Can You Make Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliates can range from single individuals to entire companies and everything in-between.  Depending on the knowledge, scope, and marketing vision that is brought to the affiliate marketing process, affiliate marketing activities can bring in revenues of anywhere between a few hundred dollars a month to tens of millions of dollars a month and beyond.

In fact, almost 20% of full time affiliate marketers report making more than $1 million per year. And over 60% make more than $80,000 per year. So as you can see,  as a career choice, affiliate marketing is a pretty solid bet.
But that’s not to say that affiliate marketing is easy. Successful affiliate marketing is based on many hours of learning, commitment and a willingness to adapt to bring the best out of every changing situation.

It’s also true that what kind of industry or niche you operate in, as well as how much work you do will influence how much you make.

How to Make Money Affiliate Marketing

So far in this post, we’ve discussed what affiliate marketing is, who is involved, how much you can make, but you’re still not exactly sure how affiliate marketing works – and how all this money is made…

Here are the 7 basic steps you’ll need to follow to achieve your affiliate marketing success:

1. CREATE AN EFFECTIVE WEB PRESENCE – Following your passions or research on a profitable niche, you create a popular website or social channel. 
   
   
2. SIGN UP WITH A GREAT NETWORK – You choose a high quality, regionally relevant and trustworthy affiliate network.
   
   
3. PICK THE RIGHT OFFERS – You pick your favorite Advertisers/products – which you think your audience will genuinely appreciate and use.
    
   
4. GET A TRACKING LINK/CODE –  You get a tracking link/code from their network – allowing your audience’s sales to be traced back to you. 
   
   
5. PROMOTE OFFERS – You promote the Advertiser and share their tracking link/code along with marketing tools like in-depth product reviews,
   banner ads & coupons to entice potential customers to buy. 
   
   
6. TRACK SALES – You watch your in-depth clicks and sales reports on your network website or app. 
   
   
7. OPTIMIZE CAMPAIGNS – You learn which customers, campaigns, channels and Advertisers work best for you. You experiment over time and find a formula for success.  

Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

So your interest is piqued, and now you’re interested in starting as an affiliate marketer? Below is more detail on each of the 7 basic steps above:

1. How To Create An Effective Web Presence

• Create Quality Content – To succeed at affiliate marketing, you have to find a way to create a presence on the web that will be exciting, fun, interesting and/or helpful to its visitors.  This can take the form of social channel, blog, email lists or website, or you can create an Advertiser which uses a number of these different channels in tandem. The most successful affiliate channels and sites are those which are extremely entertaining or useful and pull users back again and again because they are receiving genuine value from the content.

• Pick A Niche – If you have a subject or niche that you are wildly passionate about, that’s great. If you already create content about this subject or niche somewhere on the web, then you’re off to a good start. 
  If, however, you’re not wildly passionate about, say, fashion, or new technology, it’s well worth your time to research the very best niche for you to enter as an affiliate. The commission, product, and even the advertiser’s website should all play a part in your decision.

2. How To Sign Up With a Great Affiliate Network

To succeed with affiliate marketing, you’ll definitely need to sign up with a good affiliate network. This can make the difference between success and failure in an Affiliate Marketer’s career.

There are many resources an affiliate network should offer – it’s best to consider the following elements when making your choice. Make sure you pick a network that provides you:

1. Offers from Advertisers that are relevant to your audience & region
2. High commissions rates
3. Trustworthy Partnership
4. Fast Payments
5. Innovative Products 
6. Technical and marketing support in your language of choice
7. Exclusive discounts and coupons you can pass on to your audience
8. Mobile app, for monetizing your social posts on-the-go
9. Reporting system where you can check your earnings in real-time

We at ArabClicks are pioneering the gold standard for affiliate networks – customized to your lifestyle and needs in the Arab world. We give you the best offers, commissions, and exclusive coupons. What’s more, ArabClicks helps you your increase revenue with a growing palette of innovative tools:

• ArabClicks Display optimizes the banner space you allocate so only the highest converting Publisher-approved offers go live. 
  
  

• ArabClicks LinkConverter finds ordinary product links and turns them into tracked affiliate links.

Your success is truly our success – SIGNUP at ArabClicks today and we promise, you see what we mean.

3. How to Pick The Right Advertisers

Next, you’ll need to have to find an Advertiser and some specific products that you want to promote. The best products will be ones you’re already very familiar with. 

Here is a short checklist to help you decide which Advertisers are best for you to promote. Consider:

1. Your Audience – will the product really help them and make them grateful you shared it with them?
2. Value & Quality – would you tell your best friend to buy it? Would you let your sister buy it..or your mother?
3. Commission Rates – does the Advertiser offer commissions high enough to make it worth your time promoting?

Whichever Advertiser(s) you pick, ArabClicks has developed a very useful tool that will help increase your sales. It’s called SmartLink, and with it, you can create tracking links right to your favorite products, making it much easier for your customers to buy what you’ve just recommended to them. 
Learn more HERE.

 4. How to Get Your Tracking Codes/Links

You’ll get your tracking links and codes for the Advertisers you’ve chosen from your network. 

Tracking Links combine an Affiliate’s network ID with an Advertiser’s web address – and when clicked, place a ‘cookie’ in the customer’s browser. This cookie is a snippet of code that tells the Advertiser to credit that unique Affiliate ID with a commission anytime the customer subsequently buys – within a certain time period such as 30 days. 

With ArabClicks Network, you easily retrieve your tracking links from the Advertiser’s page. In just 5 minutes you could have your tracking links.

Here’s how: GUIDE/VIDEO.

Coupon Attribution Codes, sometimes known as coupon redemption, offline coupons, and code-tracked coupons are based on a unique discount codeissued to the Affiliate by the Network.  This code is used by a customer upon checkout to receive a price reduction on their purchase, and also tells the Advertiser which Affiliate to credit with the commission. 

Check ArabClicks exclusive discount codes HERE.

5. Best Ways To Promote Your Advertisers

There are as many ways to promote a product with Affiliate Marketing as there are different types of YouTube channels or themes for websites. Each Affiliate has to find out what works for them, their product, and their audience. Here are some of the more popular and successful ideas people are using:

• Product Reviews – Can be done on YouTube, a Blog, Website or another channel. Include pros, cons, and product info and more details, like your experience with the product.
  
• Show-Don’t-Tell – Show yourself using the product on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat. Tell your followers to buy it in the tracked affiliate link you’ve included. Done.
• Unboxing – Show yourself opening the box of a new product in a video. Your audience will get to experience the thrill of your first impressions right along with you. That said, do be ready to give them an element by element tour of the product specs as soon as the product is out of the box.
• Product Placement – You can naturally slip an affiliate link into a social media or blog post like an article, a recipe, an opinion piece, or a story. Just add a quick parenthesis saying “buy here” and an affiliate link wherever you’d normally mention the product. 
• Hashtags – Especially when posting on Twitter and Instagram, be sure to add many relevant niche hashtags in the image description on your posts. This is how people will find your content.
• Display Banner Ads – A great low-key way to alert your audience of Advertiser’s sale or promotion without getting market-ey in your written content. Can be placed on your site, or you can pay to place them on others’ sites through Google or ARABCLICKS DISPLAY.
• Email Newsletter – When you put out a newsletter, you can include affiliate links to recommended products or coupons. This is a great way to make money from all the email addresses you’ve hopefully been collecting from your website
• Coupons – Giving your audience coupons is a great way to motivate them to buy. You can get exclusive coupons for your audience at ArabClicks.
• Paid Promotions – You can pay Google, Facebook, Instagram – in fact most platforms to advance your Advertiser promotion to the top of the search.
  

But be careful when you use the Advertiser’s actual trademarked name in your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads. Always check Advertiser’s Terms & Conditions to be sure they don’t prohibit brand bidding. Look out here, the Advertiser can reject all of your conversions if you don’t follow their rules.

We at ArabClicks recommend that you experiment with as many of these as you need to find the style that works for you.  

Don’t be afraid to recycle successful content and customize the same message for multiple channels. Studies show that integrated marketing plans which come at their customers from more than one channel get up to 80% more sales.

Plus, remember that all traffic you send to the merchant website with your unique Affiliate ID will be tracked – so giving customers as many chances as possible to click is always a good thing. 

 6. Track Your Customer Sales

You should be able to easily track your clicks, sales and commissions on your Network dashboard, and download reports to Excel for offline use.

ArabClicks Network allows you to track your sales by Advertiser, date range, customer #, and traffic source. You can also keep your eye on each individual transaction using its Transaction ID.  

See how here: GUIDE/VIDEO

7. Optimize Your Affiliate Campaigns

Data is the key to making money online.  To run a successful affiliate marketing program, you need to track your sales and conversions in your network’s Reports system and then change one element at a time in your campaigns to see what works best. 

Think of it as a 4-legged stool. An Affiliate marketer must optimize the following 4 elements:

1. Traffic
2. Ads
3. Offers 
4. Landing Pages

Your Affiliate campaigns will be successful when you find just the right ad for just the right audience which will send them to just the right page on the website of just the right Advertiser.

FAQ

How Do I Get Paid With Affiliate Marketing?

It’s important to realize that there is also usually a minimum amount of money (such as $100) that an affiliate must earn for the network to justify the administrative expense of cutting them their check. Before the Affiliate reaches that amount, their earnings simple collect into their account. 

Therefore it’s in every Affiliate’s best interest to start strong out the gate and make their first $100, so they can truly start to feel the benefit from their efforts! 

Terms You Should Know

• Cookie – A piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user’s computer by the user’s web browser. The cookie stores information like user preferences, registration information, and shopping cart contents. 
  When someone comes to your website and clicks on your affiliate link, a cookie is placed on their browser. That cookie is used to remember the link the visitor clicked on. Even if they leave your site and come back later to make a purchase, you will still get credit for the purchase and receive a commission.
  
  
• Cookie Life – The cookie’s duration, also known as “cookie life,” depends on the advertiser and will be delineated in the advertisers’ terms and conditions. For example, if the cookie life is 10 days, when someone clicks on your affiliate link, you’ll be paid a commission for any purchase they make within 10 days of the original click.
  
  
• Commission – The share of the revenue that the Affiliate receives when they refer someone to an Advertiser website and the person takes an action.  These actions could include submitting information in a lead form or purchasing a product. Here are a few commission payment types:
  
  
• CPA – Commission Per Action. This is a set amount the Affiliate receives when someone purchases, regardless of the purchase amount. 
  Example: On an offer with $7 CPA, one customer buys $10 and another buys $1000. The Affiliate Commissions are $7 * 2 = $14
  
  
• CPS – Commission Per Sale. This is a percentage of the sale amount that the Affiliate receives, and will be bigger or smaller according to the purchase amount. 
  Example:A customer buys $1000 merchandise with a 10% CPS. The Affiliate receives $100 Commission.
  
  
• CPL – Commission Per Lead. This is a set amount that the Affiliate receives per lead, regardless of if it results in a sale. 
  Example: An Affiliate refers 25 interested leads to an Advertiser for $2 CPL. They receive $50 Commission.

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Summary

We hope you’ve enjoyed (and learned something!) from ArabClicks’ guide to affiliate marketing. 

You can also always also explore the ArabClicks website or simply sign up and start trying your hand at some of the concepts described in this article. We have a great in-depth set of Arabic & English QuickStart and Step-By-Step GUIDES.

We also have an amazing Arabic – English support staff that will be thrilled to help design and optimize an affiliate marketing strategy for your unique channel.

Whatever your level or your starting point, ArabClick has the resources to guide and support you to your ultimate goals in Affiliate Marketing.  

Looking forward to your success!