Money Making Monday - Part Two
Joining an Affiliate Program + Five Tips on Closing the Sale
Money Making Monday (MMM) is a blog series that will show you all the information you need in order to take the first steps into making your craft profitable. This series is coming out twice a month, so make sure to subscribe and like our Facebook page and you will get the latest stuff that works!
In this second part of the MMM we will be looking into joining affiliate programs and how an affiliate program connects you with the shop so you can earn commissions.
At the end of the blog post we include FIVE proven tips to make people buy from your affiliate links!
If you haven’t already, please read the Part 1 of the MMM showing you how to start making money from your craft blog and also giving you a simple explanation about what affiliate links are.
Let's start with some lingo to make sure we're on the same page:
Commission: a percentage of the selling price or flat fee given to you from the shop or the product owner as a payment for bringing in a customer. In order for you to get a commission a person must buy a product or a service using special links that you provide.
Commission Example: a 10% commission means that if a viewer clicked on your affiliate links and shopped for $400, you will be getting $40 as a payment from the shop, for bringing the sale to them. In some cases, the commission can also be set as a fixed fee regardless of the price of the product.
Affiliate: You! Well, this is you, combined with the agreement for the commission above. A person that is promoting products or services using his/her affiliate link and who gets the commission.
Affiliate link: A unique link to a shop or product or a service that contains additional information regarding who the affiliate that generated the sale is. Any affiliate gets commission by getting people online to click on his/her affiliate link and then buy or perform a required action.
Example of the affiliate link:
Ordinary non-affiliate link to a product may resemble something like this:
https://www.scrapbook.com/store/pw-t-prs.html
An affiliate link that includes the information needed to assign the commission to the affiliate would look something like this:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=33184&m=7429&u=382789 &afftrack=linkdeli&urllink=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scrapbook.com %2Fstore%2Fpw-t-prs.html
By the way, the mentioned product is this cut out:
Deep link: A link that points directly to a product instead of pointing just at the shop's first page. Affiliates use deep links to take a visitor directly to a specific product instead of taking them to a shop or a large group of products/services.
Let's say you want to receive commissions and get paid from the fictional shop we’ll call conveniently SHOP. You redirect people there to purchase stuff, through your blog posts and YouTube videos.
From that point on, you are an affiliate of SHOP! Well done!
Note: First you need to get approved in order to earn commissions. You fill out the application form on the website of the SHOP. Usually, you need to enter your name and one of the following: your blog, website or any social page. Usually, you also need to describe how you intend to promote products, SEO, Facebook, social accounts or in some rare cases paid advertising. It’s easier than it looks, just find an affiliate program, fill out a form and you get approved. Then you can start using your affiliate links and earn money.
Real example: Scrapbook.com
Scrapbook.com has a publicly available affiliate application page which can be found at the bottom of their main page.
If you apply, you are asked a few simple questions and your application goes through an approval phase.
As soon as you are approved, you can pick your affiliate links from ShareASale, the affiliate network that Scrapbook.com uses to track sales. You get your affiliate links and put them in your blog post.
Scrapbook.com is also fully integrated with LinkDeli and you can search and find all products without ever leaving your LinkDeli dashboard
There are a few dos and don'ts when using affiliate links. Here is a small list to start with. We will be expanding the dos-and-don'ts theme further in future MMM posts.
So What is So Awesome About Affiliate Marketing and It is THAT Better Than Placing Ads on Your Site?
Affiliate marketing is not only about placing as many affiliate links as possible and hope someone is going to step on them!
In the DIY/crafting scene, it is actually like doing product review marketing as the products you sell are presented through your content.
If you create enticing and well thought of content, and present the shop’s products in a proper way, you will significantly increase the clicks to the shop. This will respectively increase your sales and commissions.
If the content is not presented well, or does not focus on how the products will help the viewer to achieve the same results as in your presentation, click numbers will suffer. The viewers will try to find more examples of the use of the product on other blogs/channels and leave. This usually means someone else will step over your affiliate cookies, and thus, you will be losing sales.
So, content you present on our blog needs to be of high quality and also needs to present key product’s benefits. Some products have unique attributes or qualities that should be mentioned explicitly. For example: “Only with product X you can achieve this result because product X is made out of component Y”. You need to answer the questions that a viewer might have if they were to buy it right here and now.
Placing ads on your page is a different type of monetization, depending mainly on the traffic volume rather than quality. Moreover, the payouts are much lower than what an average crafter makes through her affiliate links. We will be comparing ads and affiliate product review marketing performance on a future MMM!
So, here’s what you’ve learned from this article:
We will be expanding our Craft/DIY money-making horizons even more on our next Money Making Monday!
If you wondered at some point if it is better to have non-affiliate ads placed all around your website and let YouTube display ads in your videos instead of using affiliate links, your question will be answered in our next MMM!
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