To become the best, you have got to learn from the best, That’s the power of learning. If you have stepped into the Affiliate Marketing this blog is for YOU.
As the saying goes,” Don’t wait for an opportunity, Create It”. That is exactly what Gurus of Affiliate marketing did. Today we are going to give you the compiled list of absolute legends when it comes to Affiliate Marketing.
If you are eager to learn and succeed if you are someone who wants to create a milestone when it comes to Affiliate Marketing, here is your opportunity. Stay tuned and buckle up as we take this journey together.
Affiliate marketing is when a product owner allows other marketers to sell his or her product on their platform, and the marketer receives a percentage of the sale as a profit for the sales. This is different from a pay per click program because an affiliate does not make any money from the product owner unless he sells something. This can also be understood as an incentive-based profit-making system. Affiliate marketing is a way for a company to sell its products by signing up affiliates (individuals), who market the company’s products for a commission or an incentive, or a share of the sales that result from those promotions. If you are an affiliate, you market other people’s products.
How to start with affiliate marketing :-
- Choosing right Network of affiliate
There should be right balance between you and party with whom you are offering your services and the benefits he is going to get from your program.There are two ways to form your network either you join established company offering affiliate marketing like Amazon and Google and other way is to deal and provide services on some specific products and services.
One way is to join the Amazon affiliate program and promote the products offered by amazon. Though the commission rate offered is a bit lower than offered by amazon but if you deal in a higher volume of sales amazon becomes the right and trusted option.
- Selecting right affiliate products by doing right research
First you should select a niche of a product which has a wide range and market base of vendors. If you are a beginner you should try limiting yourself to 2-3 products or services. This will help you to get expertise in those few products or services, then once you become knowledgeable you can go for a broader product range and services.
- Try buying the product before promoting it
You don’t need to buy all the products you are going to market. But when you buy products and utilize your products the chances of building trust and understanding your product becomes higher. This method is quick and far better than selling the product and waiting for others to review it. Product reviews are an incredible way to build trust on your product you are promoting. If you study the marketing metrics and the statistics you will be able to form strategic policies which take your program to another level.
- Create great content
When you start creating high quality good content you start getting ranking on different search engine platforms. Therefore it becomes mandatory to have good research and provide relevant content on the basis of your niche of product and services selected in the above steps.
- Make best use of social media to increase your traffic
Use of social media platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest are a great source to attract both free and paid traffic to your marketing program.
Paid traffic brings traffic to your website through paid advertisements. Ads are a great source for advertisement but the only drawback is once you stop paying the traffic on the website goes down. Another option is SEO which is optimizing your content and website pages to get good ranking on the Google search engine.
List of TOP 10 Pioneers of Online Marketing in The World (2021)
- Seth Godin
He is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, and a speaker known for his blogs which are read by millions of readers worldwide. In addition to launching one of the most popular blogs in the world, he has written 19 best-selling books like Linchpin, All marketers are liars, and Tribes, etc. Godin nailed the skill of blogging and is particularly famous for short articles that do not contain more than 350 to 500 words, but they are so well written that they get thousands of retweets and shares across all social media channels.
2. Rae Hoffman
She is an exceptional marketer and an entrepreneur for almost two decades. She also happens to be an extremely successful blogger, speaker, auditor, and a writer all at the same time. That is right, the key to success is also to learn and grow and to keep getting skilled. She is the owner of Sugaree and co-owner of Pushfire. She enhanced her marketing knowledge and created strategies to excel in a competitive market. She has tons of marketing tactics under her sleeve and has emerged as a pioneer in the field of competitive marketing.
3. Guy Kawasaki
Guy Takeo Kawasaki is an American born marketing specialist, author, and a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist. He is one of the most senior online marketing gurus one can heed to for knowledge and wisdom. He is also the author of a few most popular marketing books like The Art of the start and The art of social media. He also holds an honorary doctorate from Babson College. His writing mainly focuses on making money online by building your business and expanding it through online influence.
4. Neil Patel
He is a full-time blogger, entrepreneur, angel investor, and SEO expert. He has established himself as a self-made millionaire and he is also the founder of million-dollar online businesses like Crazy Egg and Quick Sprout. After the recent launch of his personal blog Neilpatel.com, he started sharing tips on how one can bring thousands of visitors to their website. He took benefit of the channels like Youtube.com and posted step by step guide to nail social media marketing and affiliate marketing. There is a good chance you’ve read one of his many articles or books or heard him speak or watched one of his videos. He’s everywhere, educating marketers, small business owners, and helping people to grow their business. At the age of 30, he has made a name for himself and has become a leading light for the people who want to start their business online. The journey of Neil signifies there is no limit to what you can achieve with the right mindset and mentors.
5.Brian Clark
He is a man who builds himself through all the struggles and came out on top with sheer hard work. He went from a solo blogger to the point wherein he built a multi-million-dollar business online. At the outset he started Copyblogger back in 2006 and built his audience from scratch. He took blogging to another extent by teaching his audience how to create content that builds loyal and keen readers who are eager to buy stuff. His audience engagement skills were such that he could understand what his audience wanted even on a blog. His first work was an online course “Teaching Sells”, he used his existing reader base of Copybloggers to learn over the years about marketing to build profitable blogs. It became a huge success and since then there was no turning back. He launched a few more online courses and then the famous studio press company builds and develops the Genesis framework.
6. Darren Rowse
He is a well-known and established full-time blogger, public speaker, blog consultant, and founder of several blogs and blog networks. Some of his famous blog networks include b5media, Problogger, and digital-photography-school.com. He started blogging in the good old days when it was just a word and hardly anybody knew about it. He started making thousands of dollars from the very beginning, in a year when he launched his first blog post back in 2002. Most people believe that the primary source of his income is from Problogger, but it’s not true. The major chunk of his income comes from his Digital Photography School which has more than millions of readers and email subscribers who are anxious to buy the premium end DSLR’s and the cameras that Darren Rowse recommends.
7. Ramit Sethi
Ramit is an Indian based US settled online blogger who also runs a commerce-related site called “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” which has above millions of readers all over the globe. He wrote a book with the same name as above which went on to become one of the New York Times best-selling books. His commerce and economic teachings have been covered in biggest magazines like Inc, Forbes, Fortune, etc. A chunk of his earnings also comes from online marketing, wherein is sells online premium high-priced products. He is completely practical in his approach of teachings and delivers with a style that makes readers follow him. His whole idea is based around the four pillars of Personal finance which are- banking, saving, budgeting, and investing.
8. Pat Flynn
He is also among the few dreamers who can foresee, back in 2008 Pat Flynn realized that in the coming few years blogging would be revolutionary and launched his blog Smart Passive Income. He made his blog profitable in no time, instead of the fact that his blogging niche “marketing” was extensively crowded. His journey from working in an architect firm to becoming a full-time blogger is an inspiration for many. He always shared his income reports on his blogs from the old days till now, and because of this humility and transparency, his readers admire him. He mainly makes his earning by promoting affiliate products that he trusts. He is also into product review business, wherein he writes detailed and genuine product reviews. He is in every sense a true online marketing guru.
9. Zac Johnson
He is a well-known online marketing leader with over 20 years of experience in online and internet marketing. His income primarily includes affiliate marketing where he makes millions of dollars every single year just by selling other’s products. It took him years of sheer hard work to build this empire for himself. He positioned himself at the top of the pyramid as one of the extremely successful affiliate marketers. He is also the founder of the most successful marketing blogs by the name Blogging tips and Zacjohnson.com. If you are looking to grow your affiliate business and to increase your affiliate earnings, you should follow him and his methodologies.
10.Marcus Sheridan
He is a genius and a top online marketing guru with extensive experience in affiliate and online marketing. His understanding of his customer base is remarkable. He has built his company by the name The Sales Lion from scratch by using his content marketing practices and made millions in the process. He is one of the top marketing bloggers, keynote speaker, and a HubSpot advisor. He often uses a practice “answer your customer’s questions to increase your sales” and he is correct and understands that this is the foundation of the customer building. If you have ambitions to become the best online marketer and to understand the code of affiliate marketing, follow this guru.
Affiliate Marketing Trends for 2021
The market for Affiliate Marketing is booming. It has become mainstream in the last couple of years as more and more retailers are using the channel for customer acquisition. The continuous reliability on the channel is also a validation that marketers are increasingly focusing on profitability and are looking for performance driven platforms that give them increased ROI. E-commerce firms have also variously claimed that between 12% and 20% of their total business comes from affiliate marketers and that it works better than ATL advertising for them. Consumers are too warming up to the idea of discount coupons and cashback when they shop online.
Now as we set foot in the New Year, here are some predictions for Affiliate Marketing in 2021.
- Effects of Demonetization: The cash crunch created by demonetization definitely has a role to play in how the Affiliate Marketing industry will pan out in 2021. A lot of e-commerce companies will look for performance based models which allow them to pay according to sales driven to their platform. The announcement has brought a lot of value consciousness amongst shoppers. Affiliate sites add to their savings through deals and coupons, making them an attractive option while shopping online.
- Cross-Device Tracking becomes integral: The growth of transactions via mobile platforms has been constant and is not slowing down any time soon. Retailers too offer higher commissions to promote their mobile app. Keeping this in mind, it becomes important for affiliates to set up cross-device tracking technologies. For this to happen, it is imperative that retailers enable mobile app sales attribution which currently has been enabled by a few e-commerce websites only. Amazon, Flipkart, are among the key retailers who are able to do sale attribution for transactions happening on their mobile app. We expect a lot more retailers to enable the same this year. The absence of mobile app attribution today leads to missed revenue and puts affiliates at a disadvantage.
- Content Reign Continues: As it has been for a long time now, in 20221 as well, content will remain the king. Quality content leads to credibility, better SEO, highlights a brand and also gives insights into the products being sold. Whether it is engaging content to drive traffic or product based content to drive sales, the need for high quality content will soar in the coming year as well.
- Influencer marketing will see an uptick: It looks like influencer marketing will be a big player this year. While discount/promo will continue to form the core revenue streams for merchant affiliate programs, stronger and more numerous relationships between content creators and merchants will help to build brands and diversify revenue streams. We will also see more and more bloggers-turning-affiliate marketers as their subscribers/ followers go by their content thus generating revenues for them.
- Refer-A-Friend Gains Momentum: Affiliate companies can be expected to focus on the ‘Refer-A-Friend’ model which will not only help them tap into a larger customer base but also reduce cost per acquisition. With shareable referral links and strong social media connections that users have, this model can become much more lucrative than traditional methods. When this is clubbed with perks such as lifetime referral rewards, the method is bound to create some loyal customers.
- Boom in Cashback and coupons: Indians are programmed in such a way that they’re always up for a good bargain. So much so, that the cashback and coupons based affiliate businesses can never become obsolete. The amount of savings that a user can make through each transaction alone will keep them coming back to such affiliate websites. In 2021 as well, coupons and cash back websites will see a great surge in sales just because they help users get a great deal every time they shop online.
These are few exciting things that we can expect 2021 to bring with it. Here’s hoping for a happy and productive year for affiliates everywhere!
