Every year Internet advertising market grows gradually. We see new platforms, social networks, online shops, searching engines appearing really fast and internet audience grows almost at the same pace, all this leads to advertising budgets increase. More and more people start wondering how to make money on the internet without founding online shops or new services. And solution actually exists – it is affiliate networks which gives an opportunity to start making money online.
There is enough information about business models, tools for working with affiliate networks on the internet but it is very difficult to acquire it due to the fact that it is too unstructured, different authors use different definitions and all this creates terrible mess in the heads of novice publishers.
Admitad Academy was brought to life to help beginners to understand information in the right order and to create their own efficient business models. Our primary task is to explain all sophisticated things in simple words, to show how it works and to provide all necessary data for making money through affiliate network.
So let’s get it started.
Who are these people
and what do they do here?
What is a CPA-network also called “affiliate program”? It is a system which consists of three parties:
Thus we can see that such companies need some help to lead their potential customers to make some action, for example to buy some goods or services, to subscribe to something or to download an application or some other action which advertiser wants them to do. And the best part of it is that such advertisers are ready to pay someone who will make their customers perform the required action. The cost per a performed action can be some exact sum or percentage from the cost of sold product. So here we can see what CPA is – Cost Per Action. In short, it is when advertisers pay someone for making their customers perform some action.
Example
Let’s take huge online shop Lamoda which sells clothes, shoes and accessories as an example. This shop is ready to pay 10% of the cost of sold goods to those who sell them. But how can they found somebody who will attract target audience and promote their products?
That is the time when Lamoda decides to join the affiliate network Admitad as an advertiser. The shop decides what they want to sell, for instance only some kinds of goods like shoes or exact categories of goods. Lamoda posts its offer with all conditions and the cost which they are ready to pay for one sold product. A publisher sees this offer in the Admitad catalogue of offers and realizes that he/she owns corresponding advertising space, for example beauty blog, where he/she can promote this offer.
A publisher decides to join take this offer and sends the application to Lamoda Managers who check if the publisher’s advertising space corresponds to their requirements. If everything is fine, the advertiser approves the application.Then the publisher starts his/her work, at this point it is very important to understand which way of promotion is the most relevant to the publisher’s channel. If it is a beauty blog, the publisher can create a nice and interesting post about cocktail dresses and attach to this post photos from Lamoda website and the link to the best dresses selection.This link includes publisher’s id and id of his/her blog, thus Lamoda sees that the customer found out about dresses via the publisher’s blog.
After the customer orders a dress and pays for it Lamoda make verifications. When the shop sees that its sales statistics coincides with sales shown in Admitad statistics, they pay the cost to the publisher.
I have decided to make money with CPA. How shall I start?
So you have made up your mind on joining the affiliate network as a publisher and ready to start making money. First of all you need a business model (better not one). What is a business model?
Let’s pretend that business model is a structure which consists of three main elements. We should review all elements altogether as if we look at them separately, we will not understand how everything works and how business models become efficient.
Choosing the right offer may be a tough decision for a novice publisher, there are several features upon which you can choose an offer: based on the reward rate (if you want to make money either selling few expensive products or many cheap ones); on the traffic sources or tools (i.e. advertiser wants to attract traffic only from Youtube and you have a channel), on statistics (conversion or approval rates) and other features. But to be honest we always recommend to choose the offer in accordance with your interests: if you like to play video games, check gaming offers, if you like makeup, choose offers from “Beauty and Health” section. The reason why we give such recommendation is simple – if you know the product you promote and its target audience, it will be much easier for you to choose the right tools and ways of promotion.
So as we can see there are three main elements of successful business model: attractive offer + convenient advertising space + traffic. Your task is to make it look so good that everybody wants it and also to post it on the space where most of your audience can see it. Below are the most popular business models which help publishers to earn money:
There are far more business models which publishers use to earn with CPA. Such models have appeared as a result of different combinations of offers and advertising spaces, and, of course, as a result of many efforts, tests and hard work of publishers. We believe that much more can be created, so you can try and come up with your own efficient business model which will be used by many publishers later.
To help publishers to ease their work, many additional technical tools were created. Here is a list of such tools:
Let’s take a look at how it works: potential customer sees your link and decides to click it, he/she is transferred to the advertiser’s website and performs a required action (buy/subscribe etc.). Having confirmed this action the advertiser pays for it. The more customers perform required actions, the more you get paid. Here are several tips on what you should do to increase the number of actions: а) make the offer so attractive that customers gets crazy to click and buy what’s promoted, b) make sure that advertising space is trustworthy, c) increase the number of people who visit your advertising space. You should do all this at once in order to get good results.
An example how to do
Let’s pretend that we live in a perfect world and in the beginning of december one of your secret channels tells you that in some time golden coats will be in fashion. You gather all offers with golden coats at one pretty landing page and name it goldencoat.com, then you start contextual advertising for the request “golden coat”. Your secret source was right and one perfect morning Kardashian family, Donald Trump and his wife appear wearing golden coats and everybody decides to buy it. They start searching for them and see your website, click the affiliate links and order the coats on the websites of advertisers whose links you’ve posted. As a result you earn much money.
Now let’s look at it in details. Looks perfect, doesn’t it?
Good combination of product, advertising place and traffic has led to high sales. But, unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world and this situation was made up. In reality it is hard to predict what will be in fashion, but it is not impossible. Publishers can make some researches and check what may become popular. For example if we know that in a few months a famous superhero movie will be on screen, a publisher can create a cool landing page with clothes and accessories on superhero subject. Many fans will be happy to buy such stuff.
An example how not to do
Sometimes it does not go as we planned.
Some novice publishers think that it is easy to make money just from one post. For example one publisher sees a good profitable offer (an advertiser pays well for selling dresses) and decides to promote cocktail dresses at his group in a social network. He posts a nice photo with a simple phrase “Buy the best dresses through this link”. He expected his followers to start buying the dresses at once, but as a matter of fact he doesn’t have many followers and these followers aren’t interested in cocktail dresses because he has a group of fishing lovers. So is it still possible to improve this situation? Yes, it is. Here are some tips how to do it:
The more attention you pay to analytics and the more you do, the more efficient your business model will be. You have to keep repeating these steps: create new business model – launch it – check the results – adjust – launch again – repeat till the moment the business model becomes successful and starts bringing you money.
Affiliate programs can bring huge amounts of money, but for that you must work really hard and think before doing. This market keeps growing and you can make money on it through working and spending time and sometimes investing some money in it.
I am ready to work hard. When will I start receiving my money?
So how long will it take to withdraw money to the card since the moment you have received the affiliate link?
Even if you did everything in time, launched a very successful business model and actually sold many goods for good commission, it is too early to celebrate. Advertisers need time to confirm your sale, to check if the traffic source was allowed, if the customer bought via your link and to verify statistics. Time when advertisers verify and check all details is called average hold time. During this time the advertiser can confirm or decline the sale. There are many reasons why advertisers can decline the sales, for example traffic source was not allowed or the customer did not pay for the order. Also some affiliate networks shows how much time a company needs to pay webmasters – it is called average payment time.
Summing up we should say that you can receive your first money in about a week after start but according to experience you will be able to payout it in a month or so (you cannot payout small sums).
There is one more thing that you should know about – cookies lifetime and the concept Last cookie win. Cookie — is data which are attached to the user and he/she can be tracked via this cookie. This may include logins and passwords on different websites (so that you do not need to log in every time), personal preferences and what is important for a publisher – which affiliate link the customer used. So if you posted an affiliate link and a customer saw it, clicked on it then something disturbed him and he left the website or simply he decided to compare this product with similar ones, the information that he had clicked your affiliate link will be kept within cookie lifetime if this customer did not click any other affiliate link of another publisher. And here we can see what Last Cookie Win concept is — the advertiser pays to the publisher whose affiliate link was clicked last. It means that if a customer clicked your link firstly, but then clicked someone else’s link, that last link will work and that publisher will get the payment. That is why publishers should make really attractive promotions so that customers want to buy promoted products at once.
Tips: launch several campaigns at once, test them, create something unique for your offers and be patient. Advertising campaign should be developed and expanded so that they will start bringing money.
When will I become a millionaire?
In order to wake up a millionaire one beautiful day, you should place a bet of all your money on bitcoin/casino or something like that. But at the same time after doing so you can wake up a broke the very next beautiful day.
But you can actually wake up a rich publisher one day, although you have to work hard for that. Sometimes it may seem that affiliate networks just gives money for doing nothing, but it is not like that in reality. CPA networks work with huge online shops and services, banks and other advertisers who provide more and more offers for promotion and this leads to drastic annual growth. Advertisers should see your efficiency so that they will want to keep working with you, and moreover you’d better be more efficient than their Sales, PR or Marketing Departments.
If you would like to have large scale affiliate campaigns, you should invest in them, you can take this expenses as investments in your own business. But, of course, you can earn much money through affiliate network not investing big sums in your campaigns. Such cases actually exist, for doing so a publisher should analyse his/her actions, know good traffic sources (popular bloggers for example) or attract with your cool ideas, make right decisions fast, use intuition and so on. Once again: it is possible, but you should work for it.
So why should I work with affiliate networks?
Let’s cheer up, affiliate networks are not that bad and there are many advantages of working with them. As follows below: