Digital Marketing Day 10 Affiliate marketing networks

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where businesses reward affiliates for promoting their products or services and driving traffic or sales to their websites. It has become a popular and effective way for companies to expand their reach and increase sales without investing heavily in traditional advertising.

So far, we have learnt the basics of affiliate marketing and also created a blog in our last session. I hope you are now comfortable with various affiliate marketing terms.
If you have only set up a blog but not made any posts or added any information on it yet, then you should not join any network today.

When you join any network, you would be approaching it with your product, that is your blog. A network would not be impressed if the blog has no information or nothing interesting to offer. You would be joining a network so that you can display its Ads on your blog and in turn earn commissions. So, it is important that your blog should appear presentable at the time of joining the network.

As we have made it clear many times, we not only provide you a theoretical course but also give you PRACTICAL action steps, we encourage you to take ACTION so that you can benefit much more from this course. Keeping this in mind, today we recommend you to study some affiliate networks and start looking into them.
By not joining these affiliate programs right now but studying them deeply would help you understand the requirements and get comfortable. If you have created a good blog as mentioned in the previous session, then you can go ahead and join 1 affiliate program and see the challenges  that you face.

Affiliate Marketing Networks You Can Join

• Amazon Associates – https://affiliate-program.amazon.in/gp/associates/join/landing/main.html
• Ebay Partner Network – https://partnernetwork.ebay.com/
• ClickBank – https://www.clickbank.com/affiliate-network/
• ShareASale – https://www.shareasale.com/newsignup.cfm
• Shaadi.com – http://affiliate.shaadi.com/ (why not help your friend who is looking for love and make some money in the process?)
• Infibeam – http://www.infibeam.com/Affiliate.action

For better understanding, let us go through the steps of joining an affiliate program, for instance, Amazon Associates, which pays 15% in referrals for advertising its products.

1. Follow the link https://affiliate-program.amazon.in/ to view the affiliate program offered by Amazon Associates.
2. If you have never had an account on it, click on ‘Join Now for free’ on the right.
3. On the Sign In page – Enter your email address, select that you are a new customer and sign in.
4. On the Registration page – Enter your name and create a password for this account. Click on Create Account.
5. You now need to submit your account information. Mention yourself as the Main contact for this account.
6. You now need to mention details about your blog.

• Mention the name of your blog, e.g. Vegetarian Food Recipes
• Mention the URL or address of the blog you have created , e.g. foodrecipes.blogspot.com (if the blog has been created on blogger.com)
• Write a short description of your blog – you can mention what it is about, e.g. My blog offers new and easy to make recipes of vegetarian food which are healthy and can be prepared anytime.
• Select a Primary and Secondary topic under which your blog can be categorized, e.g. Cooking.
• Choose one or more items available on Amazon that you’d like to show on your blog. These items should be relevant to the topic on which the blog has been made. Since in my example, the blog is on food recipes, I would expect more of female readers to visit my blog and hence would like to show Ads of Grocery, Health & Baby or Clothing, Shoes & Jewellery on my blog.
• Select the type for the Page you have submitted , e.g. blog.
• Select the way you will drive traffic to your blog later, e.g, select Email, Social Networks, Display advertising etc. (all of these methods will be covered later in our chapters)
• Select the way you would be earning through your blog apart from Amazon associates affiliate program , e.g.  Other Affiliate programs
• Define the way you usually build links in the blog e.g. Blog Editor
• You can select a lower limit for the number of visitors on your blog if you have newly made it. For members you have already owned a blog since long can select more number of unique visitors.
• You can then agree to the Terms and Conditions and click on Finish at the bottom.

You have successfully created your account with a new network on the completion of the above steps.

In the later chapter when we will ask you to join a network and get codes for their Ads, they will start appearing on your blog on the places you choose. For example, view the below blogs and notice how the owner has shown Network Ads on its pages –

1. http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/*
2. http://www.indiatravelblog.net/*
The above blogs have been sourced from www.topindianblogs.com* where you can go through more blogs for inspiration.
They are considered some of the best bloggers in India.
(* the owners of mentioned blogs and www.topindianblogs.com are not related to our course in any way).

Please register as an affiliate on the above networks (only if you have created a good blog) and spend some time inside to see various products which you can promote. You don’t actually have to promote anything yet, but getting comfortable with affiliate networks is the goal here.

When you’ll sign up on these affiliate networks, they’ll ask about your website. Here, you can mention the blog you created in our last session.

Do not worry if an affiliate network rejects your application. There are hundreds of good affiliate programs and networks that we will make you join later in the program. Right now it is important that you understand the overall concept and requirements of an affiliate network.

Please note that you do not ever have to pay anything to join an affiliate program. All affiliate programs around the world are free to join. It is important to know which are the best ones and which pay the most. We will let you know in the next few sessions.