Welcome back to the first lecture in this course, intro to affiliate marketing. If you are not new to affiliate marketing, you can go ahead and skip this lecture. However, I recommend that you check through it to see if you know everything that I present in this lecture. If you are new to affiliate marketing, we can go ahead and start learning. So what is really affiliate marketing, it is a innovative way of promoting products that allows you and me to join in and start promoting other people's products, and they will pay us for doing so. So this is a very, very good alternative to modern paid advertisements, like AdWords or Facebook ads or anything else similar, because it allows normal people to jump in and to stop helping businesses to promote their product and the businesses will pay them as a compensation for their efforts.

So this is the main thing you should know that affiliate marketing will pay you for promoting other people's product. Other terms that are used as synonyms for affiliate marketing, our Associate Program, internet, affiliate marketing, direct marketing partner marketing referral program. This is one very, very often used and paper performance marketing. So who are the most important players in the affiliate game? The first one is the merchant who created the product and who started the affiliate program. The second is the affiliate who joined the affiliate program and started Promoting the products of the merchant.

The fourth one is the buyer who clicked on a link of the affiliate on an affiliate link and bought the product. So these three are the main players of the affiliate game. There can be also one additional option or player, the affiliate network, which acts as an intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate. Let's see more on affiliate networks right now. So what is an affiliate network it is a fourth party that allows merchants to create their own affiliate programs without having the required tools for this. So if you have created the product, and you have a website, you can join an affiliate network and use their tools to start your own affiliate program and have your own affiliates.

Join In. This is where very important for some because affiliate networks usually provide tracking, reporting, and also payment tools for their merchants that put their products on the affiliate network. And it also makes very easy for merchants to connect with affiliates. So these are the main parts of the widespread pneus of affiliate networks because it connects merchants with affiliates, and it makes easy for merchants to start the their own affiliate program. Also, affiliate networks should be free to join. So this is an important thing that it should be free to join, especially for affiliates.

For merchants, they usually have a fee. They have to pay for each affiliate that it is that's promoting their products. But if you are an affiliate, it should be free to join any affiliate network out there. So you start with affiliate marketing, what to do next. After you join your first affiliate program, you should get your affiliate link. This is a special link that will allow the merchants to know that you sent the people who click on that link.

It has a special tracking ID in it, which will be unique for you, and which will allow the merchant to recognize you as the affiliate who sent people to the products that the merchant is selling. Also, you should start putting out this link to your site or to social networks and allow people to click on it and to buy the products that it is promoting. Afterwards, you will see that affiliate earnings will start flowing in. So how do affiliate links work? First thing first, a visitor comes and click an affiliate link you generated and the small cookie file is set in his browser, which will remember that you are the affiliate who sent him to the merchant. As long as this cookie file is in his browser and it is active, the merchant will know that the customer was sent by you.

So if the customer is not making the purchase today, but he returns to the site after five days, the merchant will know that you are the affiliate who sent him because of this cookie file which which stays on his computer. So if the visitor makes a purchase during the cookie lifetime period, You will be granted an affiliate commission. Also other occasions when you can be granted affiliate commissions without you actually sending new customers to the merchant is if the merchant has a recurring affiliate program, recurring affiliate programs mean that you are not paid just the first time the customer makes a payment, but each time he is making these payments, recurring leaves so for example, hosting providers have similar affiliate programs because they cost that their customers have to pay them monthly or yearly and each time a customer you refer pays for the hosting. The hosting provider will also pay affiliates an affiliate account Also another way to earn affiliate commissions without you sending new customers is joining tiered affiliate programs.

If you join a tiered affiliate program, you can reach refer other people who will start and promote the product as an affiliate. You will have these people your as your super affiliates, and you will earn affiliate commissions each time your super affiliates will promote the product. And we refer someone as a customer for the merchants. So your super affiliate makes a sale, you also get a small cut of that sale. Also, you can retract your money that accumulates in your affiliate account in usually at the end of month, which marks the point of affiliate payments or other merchants allow manual retraction of your affiliate commissions. And but this is specific to each merchant, and you should check for each how payments are done.

So how are your affiliate Commission's calculated? Usually merchants pay you by results so they don't pay you just because you're an affiliate. They pay you by your results. If you send more customers, your payments will be larger. And these are the main categories on how your payments are calculated. First thing is revenue sharing revenue sharing means that the merchant will share with you a percentage of his revenue.

This means that your commission might not be exactly the amount of the payment which the Customer makes on the merchant side, but it's a percentage of the merchants revenue. So, as an example, if t shirt costs the merchant, the production of the T shirt cost the merchant $10 for example, and the T shirt is sold for $15 the revenue of the merchant is $5. And if the merchant uses a revenue sharing method, he will share with you a percentage of that $5 which is his revenue. Okay, the second method is per purchase. This is usually for online products in for which their production cost is zero so the merchant can share with you the whole cost of the product, the whole price of the product. So if a customer goes to a page and buys a $10 WordPress plugin, the merchant can share with you 50% of the $10 he received because his production costs for the plugin are zero.

Another way of earning is paper signup. If you refer customers, and they actually sign up to the mark to the merchant page, then you will earn a fixed amount of money. This is usually used for online casinos, where people are putting in money after they sign up usually so this is why merchants pay you for leads for signups. People another way of calculating your affiliate Commission's is per action. If a customer makes an action in the merchant site, if he puts in some money to the merchant site, if he clicks on something, if he fills the form, each merchant can create its own action for which he wants to pay affiliates. Also, another thing is cost per impression.

If you send 1000 people to an affiliate site, or if 1000 people view actually a banner of the affiliate site, you will get a payment or so there is another way cost per click, which in which merchants will pay you for each click you generate for their sites. So if a visitor comes and clicks on your link, you will get a small commission however, the five and six points listed here are not so usual and merchants do not use this very often you will see 123 and for mainly because this is the most loved affiliate programs that merchants use. So what types can be the Commission's that you get paid? They can be single per purchase recurring per month or per year or bonuses. The single commission is when a customer purchases a product and you get paid for it. Recurring commission is when the customer pays recurringly month after month or year after year for a product and you will get recurring commissions for it.

Bonuses is when you hit milestones and the merchant rewards you for a milestone you just hit or just got to. So let me talk about multi tiered affiliate programs. So these affiliate programs are really great because they allow us to earn passive income. So how these work is that they allow you to refer other people, which if they sign up and become the merchants affiliates themselves, then you will be granted an affiliate commission each time these newly formed affiliates will make a sale. So if one of your sub affiliates will create a sale will generate the sale, you will also be granted an affiliate commission, even though these affiliate commissions usually are Smaller than the regular tier one affiliate Commission's they can also stack up because you can refer many affiliates under you and which will become your sub affiliates. So many people confuse the multi tiered affiliate programs with mlms or with pyramid schemes.

So let me show you the difference between these. I have created here a table showing the difference between single tiered affiliate programs, multi tiered affiliate programs, mlms and pyramid schemes. So are you getting paid for commissions in a single tiered affiliate programs in multi tiered affiliate programs and for mlm? Yes, in the pyramid schemes you are not getting paid for commissions because environments in a pyramid scheme. There are no products that are actually getting promoted. The products are only fictional paid for recruiting in single tier affiliate programs, you're not paid for recruiting in all other programs, you are famous for recruiting pay to get in into the affiliate program.

You don't have to pay to get in in the single theater affiliate program for in the multi tiered affiliate programs. But in mlms and pyramid schemes you have to pay to get the product exists. Here, yes, yes, yes and no. This is the big no for pyramid schemes. And this is why they are not legal, because they don't actually promote a product. They just promote the possibility of earning If you are a super affiliate, if you generate sub affiliates sorry.

So, they promote the fact that you can start earn after you spread the word of this of the possibility of other people to join this program and they also have to pay to get in. So remember you get paid commission of other people paying to get in this program. So this is why pyramid schemes are not illegal. MLM mlms are in the gray zone of legal mess, however, usually the day are legal. Let me show you here some ways to earn affiliate income. I will be back on these in the in some of the future lectures.

However, let me release this right now. And I will be back soon on them. Content sites, you can create websites which provide which provide information to visitors and also have some affiliate links in them. You can use paid marketing to promote your affiliate links. These are Google ads or Facebook ads or Instagram ads or any other marketing network that you can use and create paid ads for promoting your affiliate links. You can use blogs or forums to post comments in them and add your affiliate links to the comments.

You can use comparison websites and create your own comparison websites and put affiliate links in the product links for the listed products. You can create coupon websites which offer discounts for products and Putting some affiliate links in the content, you can use social media to share your affiliate links. You can use email marketing to get out to your subscribers and put in the content of the email some affiliate links and you can come up with your innovative ways to spread the affiliate links to people who are in need of the products which you are promoting. Okay, so this is all for this lecture. I see you in the next one.