What are Affiliate Programs and Networks and How Do You Make Money With Them?

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What are Affiliate Programs?

Affiliate programs are programs that are set up by a business selling a product or service with the use of an affiliate network in order to help advertise the items they sell through third-party advertisers like blogs like this one in order to reach an ever wider audience that they can sell their goods and services to.

The way affiliate programs and networks work is similar to the way that ad programs and networks, like Google Adsense being one of the better-known ones, work. One key difference between the two is who is doing the work to sell the product to you the consumer. With ads, the company selling the product is doing the work to try and sell something to you, and they can place their ads anywhere even on pages unrelated to the item they’re selling since they are using fancy-looking videos and graphics to entice you. Affiliate programs are different in that the company is indirectly hiring someone else to do their advertising for them.

Depending on the “niche” or category someone might be already blogging, making videos on YouTube, or selling on some other online venue, other companies, like Amazon being one of the biggest affiliate programs, will give you the opportunity to increase your income if you join their affiliate program to sell the same or similar products than the ones you already sell or talk about. What’s more, depending not all companies do this but some like Amazon have affiliate programs that you can join to help sell their product in several nations.

Amazon has affiliate programs in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, China, Italy, Spain, India, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, the UAE, Singapore, the Netherlands, Suadi Arabia, Sweden, and Poland. That means if you’re interested in selling or reviewing certain products that are available on Amazon.com, you can join their affiliate program and make some money through them by joining from one of those areas.

That said although Amazon Affiliates is one of the most popular or well-known affiliate marketing programs out there it is far and away from being the only one. If you check the bottom of the webpage of most well-known companies and even some smaller lesser-known companies you will typically find a link there that is labeled “Affiliates” or something like that. That is where if you are particularly interested in making money off of a product or service you already talk about online you can join that individual company’s affiliate program.

More often than not the owners of the company will have some specific criteria before you’re even allowed to join the affiliate program though. They might require you to have a certain number of subscribers or views per video on YouTube. They might require you to have a certain amount of page views per month if you’re a blogger or eCommerce store. The point is though that there is a whole wide world of affiliate marketing opportunities available to make money from products or services sold by lots of different companies that one would have never even have imagined you could make money through affiliate marketing before!

If you blog or make videos about technology, companies like Microsoft have their own affiliate program that you can join here.

If you’ve ever wanted to travel the world and make money by blogging about it, Superstar Blogging is a website that provides courses made by people who have successfully done so. That way if you wanted to you could take their course and potentially make money by blogging about travel. Then, if you felt their course helped you be successful in that endeavor you could join their affiliate program to market the course to others.

If you believe in the future of solar and renewable energy and like talking about and advertising stuff like that, there are companies out there like Arcadia, who literally help people save money on energy by doing things like building solar panel grids meant for entire neighborhoods to share, or GoGreenSolar that provide such services. You can make money marketing stuff like that to people with their affiliate programs. Here’s Arcadia’s affiliate program and here’s GoGreenSolar’s affiliate program.

My point at the end of the day is that there are many different niches that you can write and make videos about in order to promote a product that you are interested in and know at least a little bit about in order to help you make some extra income that can even eventually even blossom into replacing your full-time income!

What are Affiliate Networks and How do They Work?

Affiliate networks are basically the middle man between the affiliate and the actual company. Think of the relationship as being similar to banks or stores using the services of payment transaction companies like Visa or Mastercard in order to be able to offer their own credit cards or like someone who sets up an online store on a website like Amazon in order to sell their merchandise.

Affiliate networks allow merchants to be able to pay a certain percentage to publishers like bloggers and YouTubers when someone takes an action, which is typically a sale, after clicking an affiliate link provided by the company. Affiliates are generally able to join affiliate networks for free, whereas there is generally a fee for merchants to participate.

There are several affiliate networks out there that both individuals and merchants can join in order to promote sales on the merchant’s end and to find products to promote on the individual publisher’s end. A couple of affiliate networks include ones like Clickbank or CJ Affiliate. There are several affiliate networks other than those two that a company might use in order to set up its own affiliate program.

Here’s are videos from the Youtube channels, John Crestani and Andy Hafell, giving a basic explanation about how affiliate programs work and how to get started.

NOTE: WHILE THE VIDEOS ABOVE IS ACCURATE IN TERMS OF HOW TO SIGN UP FOR AND USE AFFILIATE PROGRAMS TO MAKE MONEY, NORMALLY YOU HAVE TO HAVE A SIZABLE FOLLOWING AND VIEWS ON A BLOG LIKE THIS ONE, YOUTUBE, SOCIAL MEDIA, OR SOME ONLINE PLATFORM IN ORDER TO BE ALLOWED TO JOIN AFFILIATE PROGRAMS, AND THE SECOND VIDEO IS A LITTLE BIT MORE ACCURATE IN TERMS OF HOW MUCH WORK NEEDS TO BE DONE TO BE SUCCESSFUL BY CREATING GOOD, DETAILED CONTENT!

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