Affiliate marketing can be your main business model if you focus all your efforts on growing it, but if you already have an online business, and your plan is to implement affiliate marketing as a flexible approach to increase your income, you can start by looking at the tools you use today to run your business.
To explain how; let’s use an example!
An online business owner (let’s call her Sarah!) runs her own online business as a Freelance Web and Brand Designer and she wants to explore her options within affiliate marketing.
Sarah starts by listing the different tools and software she uses to perform her job. One of the tools Sarah uses is called Elementor. It’s a website page builder that she uses to design websites for her customers.
Like many other software companies, Elementor offers an affiliate commission to those who successfully promote and sell their product to others.
So basically Elementor developed their product and they are responsible for its functionality, pricing, FAQ’s and customer support.
Instead of relying only on their own internal marketing team, they offer commissions to external marketers who promote and sell Elementor to others. Those external marketers are the affiliates (Sarah in this case).
So by being an Elementor user, Sarah knows the product well and can easily talk about it with others who could benefit from it. She can explain its features, create tutorials, and compare it to other web design tools. In other words, Sarah is an Elementor expert and can comfortably create high-quality content that promotes Elementor.
How To Become An Affiliate For Elementor?
Sarah starts by looking up “Elementor Page Builder” on Google and finds their affiliate program on their website. She reviews and evaluates the affiliate program, the terms and conditions and the fixed commissions they pay to their affiliates, and she decides to promote the product as an affiliate marketer.
Sarah follows the instructions and answers a few questions and submits her request to become an affiliate for them through their website.
The Elementor affiliate team reviews the application and returns to her in a few days saying that they consider her as a proper affiliate to their tool, and grant her access to their affiliate dashboard. By the end of this step, Sarah is officially an affiliate marketer for Elementor.
How does Elementor know when Sarah made a sale for them so they can pay her commission?
When Elementor approved Sarah as an affiliate, they provided her with a unique link; called an “affiliate link” which links to the Elementor Page Builder website – so when someone clicks on this link, it directs them to a sales page where they can purchase Elementor.
Every approved affiliate marketer is provided with their own unique affiliate link. If someone clicks on that link and purchases the Elementor Page Builder, both Sarah and the Elementor team get notified about the sale.
And because this link is unique to Sarah, Elementor will be able to track that it’s her who generated the sale for them, so they can pay her her fair cut of the profit.
The affiliate platform Elementor created for their affiliate marketers helps them track and manage sales as well as see earned commissions and request payments.
Usually, all affiliate programs are managed through a platform where both the product owners (Elementor in this example) and their affiliates (Sarah) can track the sales and commissions earned.
How does someone find and click on Sarah's affiliate link?
This is when Sarah’s job as an Affiliate Marketer and content creator takes place. It is up to her to define the content she’s comfortable creating and that her audience finds useful.
As long as she makes sure to follow Elementor’s terms and conditions, it is up to her to decide how she promotes and sells Elementor to others.
So now Sarah has a few tasks to complete. Like researching where could her audience be found, is it on Pinterest? or maybe on YouTube? That’s up to her to determine where her affiliate business is going to grow.
She creates articles, social media posts, and YouTube videos, or sends out emails to her subscribers (if she has any), and she explains how the Elementor Page Builder helps her design websites. She talks about the unique features of Elementor that are ideal for beginners and professionals, and she shares her honest experience with Elementor as a customer in general.
Inside the content she creates, Sarah places her affiliate link for the reader to use if they are interested in reading more about Elementor, or if they want to buy and use Elementor to design their own websites.
So the end goal here is for Sarah to get her audience to click on the affiliate link she places inside her content, so they end up buying Elementor and with that, she earns profit from each sale made through that link.
How are affiliate commissions being paid?
The income Sarah earns as an affiliate is paid to her by Elementor (or other companies she’s an affiliate for) whenever she successfully generates a sale for them.
Usually, commissions are paid every 2 weeks, every month or whenever a sale is generated (this differs from one affiliate program to another depending on the agreement between companies and affiliates).
There are many similar products to Elementor out there, and there are many companies with useful products, whether digital or physical, that offer an attractive affiliate program to external marketers who own a well-established online presence and are ready to create content and promote these products in exchange for a commission.
and The categories of these products are limitless. Regardless of the niche and industry you’re planning to build your affiliate business around, you’re going to find many companies that offer you the same opportunity just like Elementor.
