What Is Affiliate Marketing?

June 26, 2020 | This post may include affiliate links. As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through these links, at no extra cost to you.

One of the ways that I’ve been using to earn additional income over the years is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is referring or recommending a product or service to people. If those people make a purchase, you get paid a commission.

Key Points

Transcription provided by Otter

Hi, this is Arthur Cundy from ArthurCundy.com. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about what affiliate marketing is, how does it work, and how you can use it to earn additional income in your household.

Okay, so before I get started, let me tell you a story. So back when I got my start in entrepreneurship, back in 2000, I started with building websites. So I was a web designer, and I created websites for small businesses and large companies and you know, everything in between. And so over the course of building websites, one of the natural things is, you know, after I build a website, you need to get it online, right and so that means I need to get the client set up with a web hosting company.

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For those of you that don’t know, web hosting companies, you know, they have a whole bunch of servers, and they charge, you know, anywhere from $5 a month to $19 / $20 a month, depending on what you need. And they have a whole bunch of web servers, and they put your website files on the webserver. And that’s how you get your website, live on the internet for anyone to find it.

And so I wasn’t a web host company. And so what I did was I would look for a web hosting company that I can refer to my clients, based on the type of website that they had, whether it’s ecommerce or maybe a regular basic, you know, brochure website with only a few webpages. And I would refer that client to that web host.

I was doing research and I found a web hosting company that I can refer my clients to. I was like, “Oh, this looks cool.” And when I was looking at their website, I realized that when I refer someone to that company, they would pay me, a one time fee of $60. So I refer someone over there, you know, one of my clients over there, and the web hosting company would pay me $60 for referring them a customer. And I thought, Oh, you know, this is cool, you know, I could get paid for doing something that I was already going to do anyway. And so that kind of piqued my interest. And I got more curious, so I started doing more research. And I found that a lot of the web hosting companies that were out there, they had some sort of referral program where I could refer someone to them and you know, I’m making a little bit of money. And I thought, Oh, this, this must be a thing. And, you know, I got more and more interested in it.

And then I found one particular one that would not only pay me One time, but they would pay me ongoing for as long as that client remains a customer of that web hosting company. And I thought, wow, I could get paid months and years into the future for just referring a client one time. And so I got really excited.

It became so simple to me because I would build a website and refer a customer there. And we just it was just a natural transition, I would say, Okay, great. Your website is done; here’s a great web hosting company that you can get your web hosting account set up with. And they would just go ahead and set up their account and I would get paid ongoing, and I’ve made thousands of dollars this way using just this one technique.

That’s essentially what affiliate marketing is. It’s referring or recommending a product or service to a customer. And when they sign up, you get paid.

Some programs, you get paid one time for just doing that one transaction. And a lot of other ones, you get paid ongoing consistently. So you do the work once, setting up an account for someone, and you get paid month after month, year after year ongoing as long as that person remains a customer. And so that’s essentially what affiliate marketing is. It’s referring customers, referring people to products and services that they’re already looking for. And when they sign up, you get paid.

So how does this work? Affiliate marketing has been around since the early 1980s. And many big companies, you know, Amazon, Target, Best Buy…. any company that you’re using, chances are they have an affiliate marketing program attached to it.

Companies love this because it’s performance-based marketing, so they only have to pay you if they get a customer so that they’re not spending a whole bunch of money on advertising. They just set up the program, and they only have to pay you when you produce a sale. And it’s great for you because there are no upfront costs to get started, you can join any affiliate program out there. Some programs have a little bit stricter guidelines. But for the most part, you can go to a website, scroll down to the bottom, usually there’s a link that says affiliate program or referral program. Click on that link and sign up and you’ll get approved in like a day or so.

What’s great is that they’ll give you a ton of tools to help you promote their product or service. They’ll give you sometimes a lot of training. There’ll be a private Facebook group, sometimes they’ll have like weekly or monthly webinars that you can join, where they’ll teach you and coach you on the best ways to promote their product or service. They’ll give you web banners or advertisements, articles that you can put on your website or your blog, so there are tons of resources that they’ll give you to help you promote their service.

So for example, the web hosting firm that I was partnered with, they provide web banners for me to use. They even gave me website themes that I could use and create my own web hosting website. So it can look like I’m my own web hosting company, which is pretty cool. They had a forum, articles, a private blog that I can go to and read articles on how to promote their service.

It became which do I focus most of my time on. So when I was creating websites, there’s a ton of time and effort that’s involved with creating websites. I need to speak to the client, hash out details, create a proposal, in some cases, write out a whole bunch of specifications and requirements for that website. I’ve got to design the website, go back and forth on revisions. Get a programmer involved if there’s custom things that they need to build out the website. And, you know, this can take anywhere from a couple of months to like a year, year and a half, to build out a website.

So I can do that, or I could just refer a customer to a web host company, and get paid consistently over and over and over again. So there’s pros and cons with different ways of earning income. And over the years, I’ve leaned more along the ways of affiliate marketing because there’s no upfront cost, I don’t have to pay anything to get started. They provide a lot of support with helping me promote whatever you know the product or service is and if it’s a good product or service, then it’s easy to recommend it to people that and I get paid and it’s consistent, and it’s over and over again.

So that’s essentially what affiliate marketing is. And I highly recommend that if you’re looking for a way to earn additional income, or increase your income, or if you have another business, you can plug affiliate marketing into that to increase revenue, as well. So yeah, affiliate marketing is the way to go. Especially if you don’t have a lot of time, you don’t have a lot of money looking to get started in earning some additional income.

Hey, before you go, if you’re looking for a way to earn additional income for your household, I’ve got something special for you. So I’ve created this free web class, where I’m going to show you how to earn consistent monthly income without creating a product or service or spending a ton of time away from your family. So go to ArthurCundy.com/webclass and enter your info, and I’ll send it to you right away. And I know this is really going to help you earn some additional income on a monthly basis. So, ArthurCundy.com/webclass, and I’ll see you there.