Money making formulas online are often straight forward yet there normally is a catch on getting the right audience to show of your work and those affiliate links that make sales. You need a relevant and large audience, which is often a nightmare to get.
When it comes to getting an audience, it could mean paying for it through various means or waiting for your presence to be recognised by the world wherein you will be marketing your work to your followers. The latter often works through a formula called ‘C-T-P-M’ (Content, Traffic, Pre-selling, Monetizing). The C-T-P-M model takes time to realise yet it is the ultimate for all online success prospects. In this post I will focus on affiliate marketing, a genuine money making method that rely highly on a large following. Content is king but having a large following/audience is even more important as you will learn how affiliate marketing works. Later in the post I will give my thoughts on the African perspective of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing
According to WikiPedia, affiliate marketing is a marketing arrangement in which affiliates receive a commission for each visit, signup or sale they generate for a merchant. Obviously, if you place your affiliate links where there is no potential customer, you won’t make any sale. In such cases, physical presence is even better because it is easy to see the need to change locations when there is no traffic.
According to Investopedia.com, there are three types of affiliate marketing:
- Unattached Affiliate Marketing: This is just for making money and nothing else. People who practice this type of marketing may not have interest in the product or service at all but still promote it just to get paid.
- Related Affiliate Marketing: This is promoting a product that you know something about. You may have interest in the product and are fully aware of how it works and are possibly talking about to your followers, but have not used it yourself.
- Involved Affiliate Marketing: This is when you promote a product or service which you have used or are also offering yourself. You may promote it for your counterparts to make more money for yourself and gain favour with them.
However, as already mentioned, if you have the money to spend on marketing, use it but know that your audience might disappear when your budget runs out. If you want to create an organic audience, get on doing some or all of the following:
- Create a website, preferably a blog, where you will post tasty content for your readers. Content can be in form of articles, pictures/photos, videos, podcasts, slideshows, etc.
- Join your preferred social media platform. You may join as many as you can manage. Keep posting relevant content and be ready to engage with your followers.
- Join social media groups/pages, websites and vlogs that are within your chosen niche and participate actively. This could be in form of posting comments, responding to their call for action and sending emails to owners of the platform.
The African context
The many influencers living in Africa have a chance to earn a living from affiliate marketing. There may be fewer buyers from Africa, largely because of the low appetite for buying service or products online and affording capabilities, yet there can be many buyers from elsewhere. In my experience, Africans can do good business with people from Asia than with the Americans. This is a subject for another day.
Africa has also seen a handful of successful vloggers, especially on YouTube. These too can make a good catch with affiliate marketing. Similar to the influencers, their catch might not be as much from Africa but rather across the seas.
Never give up working on creating your audience because it has a huge potential to pay off in future. Keep pushing yourself forward because unless you do it yourself, nobody will.
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