Entering any new industry is always associated with the need to familiarize yourself with a previously unknown slang. We realize that many terms used in affiliate marketing are quite meaningless for beginners, and all of them must look for an explanation for each âunordinaryâ word. We want to give our publishers a ready dose of specific knowledge about affiliate marketing - everything there is to know so that you do not have to look for it anywhere else.
Letâs start with the basics.
MyLead affiliate network. What is that?
MyLead is a global affiliate network that has been constantly growing since 2014. By making money with MyLead, you can earn on many products and services. Everything is based on the CPA (cost per action) billing model, which means that the publisher receives a commission for each action performed by the client.
The most money you can earn is by selling products, so here we are, back with the subject of the aforementioned CPA model.Â
Do you want to know more about how MyLead works? Check out the most frequently asked questions by our publishers.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a relationship between the publisher and advertiser. The advertiser wants to reach the widest possible audience with their product or service. The publisher - a physical person like you, gives them a helping hand with that. The publisher promotes the advertiserâs goods on the internet using affiliate links. Each click on this link that is performed by the customer means a profit for the publisher in the form of a commission.
Affiliate Marketing in practice
The first step, from your - the publisherâs point of view, is to find the affiliate program you want to make money on. Then you register in the program of your choice. After joining the program, youâll receive a specially generated affiliate link. This is where you can start promoting your product or service.Â
The advertiser will reach potential customers at a low cost. After all, they donât have to worry about advertising or promotion methods. Finding the target audience is on the publisher. But what exactly is a target group? This is the group of people potentially interested in the product or service you are promoting. For example, if you advertise dietary supplements for athletes, it is best to look for clients on sports and fitness blogs. The second offer is Facebook groups associating enthusiasts of sports activities. Customers interested in dietary supplements for athletes can also be found on YouTube. A good lead is to post affiliate links in the comments under exercise videos or statements from sports nutritionists.Â
In summary, the publisherâs tasks include:
Take care of your future. Use the potential of affiliate marketing
The interest in affiliation is growing. This is due to many factors. One of them is the fact that
affiliate marketing provides passive income, which means that you earn money every moment. Even if you donât devote too much of your time to affiliate marketing, or just not at all, for example, while sleeping. Money flows to your account by itself. And thatâs what a passive income means.
Youâve probably wondered many times how is it possible that some publishers earn huge amounts of money promoting affiliate programs. How do they do it? These are techniques and strategies that should work perfectly. As you may know,Â
John is a second-year student of mechanics and machine construction. He has a lot of free time, so he decided to try his hand at affiliate marketing. Itâs a convenient form of income for him: he can work whenever he wants, wherever he wants. John also has a passion: he is a bodybuilder and runs a blog where he shares his experiences.
Kate has always dreamed of setting up her online store with dietary supplements for athletes. She knows their diets very well. Sheâs a sports nutritionist by education, so she makes sure that her store offers only good quality products.Â
Kate and John earn thanks to affiliate marketing. How is that possible?
While surfing through the partnersâ offer, John chose the program that should be introduced to promote Kateâs dietary supplements. John, as a publisher, was supposed to target advertisersâ (Kateâs) audience. Each side benefits from this, including the customer who makes a purchase. John receives a commission for each sale, and Kate gains customers, and thus - sells more than before! The customer can enjoy a supplement that will support their body at the gym.
Because affiliate marketing is all about reaching a specific niche
A niche is a narrow group of customers who have the same goals and expectations. People from the same niche search for specific benefits. Every customer is different. They can be distinguished by gender, age, place of living, and needs.Â
The MyLead affiliate network offers affiliate programs from various categories. All of this exists so that you can choose a program thanks to which you will reach your niche.Â
Is there anything suitable for you? Do you think that you know the niche that you could reach with a program from a given category? Great! As you can see, it is not that difficult at all. Knowing your niche is extremely important. Why? It is much easier to develop an effective promotional campaign for a product or service if you know the needs and expectations of a niche, i.e. potential customers.
7 most common mistakes made by publishers. DONâT DO THIS!
1. Donât spread yourself too thin... Donât promote several affiliate programs at the same time
Donât promote too many affiliate programs at the same time if youâre a beginner. It will be a real waste of your time. Itâd be better if you spend it on choosing one, maybe two affiliate programs that you like. It will be much easier for you to start your adventure with affiliate marketing with a product you know well.Â
2. Donât focus on sales onlyÂ
Our experience shows that many new publishers are only satisfied with their activities when they manage to sell a given product or service. Of course, we're not denying that publishers earn money from sales because itâs an indisputable fact. However, itâs worth bearing in mind that selling is the last element of the sales funnel. Before making a purchase, the customer must become familiar with the product. Your original product descriptions will help them in this. Make sure the description is credible. If you can, bold the most important phrases. Remember that users donât read all of the text! They just scan it. Oh, another extremely significant thing - people buy with their eyes.Â
Do you need help creating descriptions? Contact a mentor - Czarek.
3. Not knowing the needs of your target group
Letâs assume that you run a blog for people who are crazy about healthy eating. And suddenly, you are serving them an entry about snacks full of sugar with hundreds of unnecessary calories. How do you think such a post will be interesting for your target group? Well, it wonât. The moral is that before you start promoting a product, you should think carefully about who will be interested in it. Think about the problems your potential customers may be facing, then show them in an accessible way that your chosen product is a solution to these problems.
Do you need help in defining your target group? Contact our mentor.
4. Your content doesn't stand out
âOur priority is the satisfaction and fulfillment of the customersâ. How many times have you read this sentence on various websites? Exactly. Old-fashioned phrases donât work for affiliate marketing or anything else. It should be noted that such common phrases not only have a negative impact on potential customers but also do not have a good effect on SEO. One of the overarching SEO principles is creating unique content. Only such texts like that have a chance to appear high in Google search results.Â
5. Too little content
Create, donât limit yourself. Realize that is your content that attracts customersâ attention. Good content is to lure the user and then evoke the need for a given product or service. Make sure your content is thoughtful. This is what content is:
- videos
- social media posts
- product reviews
- Â email marketing
- blog entries
When creating content, remember about colours. Yes, what colour you use, when creating content, can have a huge impact on usersâ purchasing decisions! You can read more about colours in affiliate marketing here.
6. Limiting yourself to one source of traffic
Are you only relying on one traffic source? We advise you to stop that. Top-earning publishers experiment with a variety of traffic sources. They are not afraid to test and try new things out. Try everything available: paid ads, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, get engaged in blog forums. Then analyze the results and draw conclusions. Regular statistics will allow you to answer the question from which source of traffic you get the most valuable users, i.r. those who purchase the product.
7. Donât mess with SEO
It is worth following the SEO rules. Thanks to SEO, the publisher can enjoy free traffic from search engines. However, we won't charm you here - it takes some time for the effects of SEO activities to translate into traffic. Patience is at premium here but itâs worth it.Â
How much you earn depends, among other things on what promotion strategy you choose. Planning your strategy is a very important step that should not be overlooked. Experienced affiliate mentors from MyLead shared their knowledge with us and indicated the most effective methods of promotion. Get to know them.
1. Expanding the emailing list
The content of the email is the perfect place to put an affiliate link. Email marketing is highly effective. It is worth taking care of the correct order of emails, quantity, and frequency of sending messages.
When preparing your emails, make sure that their content is original. Do not duplicate content found on the web. Also, see how other marketers create emails. Subscribe to the newsletter or subscribe and be inspired by the best.Â
2. Be active on social media
Create the content you want to read yourself. Refer to statistics, research, and results in your posts. Show that your product can solve your audienceâs problems. A good idea to increase traffic to your website is to organize contests. However, remember not to overdo it with the number of posts with an affiliate link. Such content is not trustworthy and simply looks artificial. You should strive for your audience to see you as a professional, i.e. an expert in a given industry or topic.
It is also worth discussing the issues of adapting the form of content to the social media channel.Â
If you still donât know how to advertise your products on social media, please contact one of our mentors.
Mysc and
Czarek are at your disposal. They are great affiliate marketing practitioners who share their impressive knowledge with MyLead publishers.
3. Use professional tools
Professional tools like those that MyLead makes available to its publishers. Here weâre talking about reliable Content Lockers, i.e special systems blocking access to a particular part of your content. As an internet user, you must have already encountered this functionality. Ever wanted to download a file but found out you have to pay for it? This is how Content Lockers work. They allow you to block access to specific content, files, videos, and applications. You can read more about Content Lockers here.
4. Cloak affiliate links
While it is recognized that direct affiliate links can be successfully advertised, MyLead mentors find this practice inappropriate. At first glance, such links do not look very appealing and immediately reveal us, because they simply look like affiliate programs. So there is a risk that users will not click on the link or remove your ID from it, and then you can only dream about earnings. However, this problem can be forgotten, so to speak, thanks to popular shorteners -
bitly.com and
goo.pl. However, let us emphasize that this is also not a completely perfect solution. The best solution is your domain.
Unfortunately, it is notorious for links to be blocked on social media. If a specific link/domain is blocked, e.g on Facebook, all posts containing this link will disappear from the portal, and this entails the loss of the entire source of traffic. This is perhaps the darkest scenario that you can even imagine. However, there are ways to bypass Facebookâs security.Â
You can read more about how to effectively earn money on Facebook in our free ebook.
Keeping a work journal
On forums dedicated to earning online, you can keep public work journals:
Why is it worth keeping a diary? Here is the list of the pros:
- Increasing self-motivation by setting goals and daily tasks to be performed;
- Discipline to perform these tasks;
- Giving other people a possibility to give advice - you can see what stage you are at and what you could change/improve;
- Having the possibility to trace your path to money and activities at a later time.
Also, it is worth getting acquainted with a helpful method of organizing your online work. Proper organization is very important and has a direct impact on the results achieved.Â
A dictionary of the most commonly used concepts related to making money on MyLead
Cost per action (CPA) â it is the rate for the campaign we promote (the action is performed by someone else - and we only advertise our link).
The CPA consists of:
- CPD (cost per download) â rate for downloading the file;
- CPI (cost per install) â rate for installing our file;
- CPL (cost per lead) â rate for obtaining a sale lead (correct filling out the contact form);
- CPS (cost per sale) â rate for the sale made through our affiliate link;
- CPR (cost per registration) â rate for each registration in a given website/game/portal/other;
- CPM (cost per thousand, âMâ as Roman 1000) â rate for 1000 views/clicks/other actions. The most popular use of CPM is the rate for 1000 page/advertisements views;
- CPC (cost per click) â rate per click on our affiliate link;
- CPO (cost per order) â rate for the order (regardless of the value of purchases).
Types of CPA offers:
- DOI (Double-Opt-In) â lead is approved after the user confirms the email address
- SOI (Single-Opt-In) â lead is approved immediately after entering the e-mail address, the user doesn't have to confirm it;
- Incent â an offer can be advertised anywhere, including generating motivated traffic;
- Non-Incent â an offer requires only high-quality traffic, motivated traffic is prohibited;
- Email submit â lead is approved after entering the email address in the DOI or SOI;
- PIN submit/Confirm PIN â lead is approved after confirming the PIN from the SMS message. In this category there are also SMS MO offers;
- Lead Gen â lead is approved for obtaining lead sale (CPL);
- Sell Gen â lead is approved for generating sales (CPS);
- Credit Card â lead is approved after connecting and charging the customerâs credit card;
- Survey Completion â lead is approved after the correct completion of the survey.
Types of SMS and IVR rates:
- MT â it is a subscription, where the customer gives his phone number and receives a text message informing about the subscription costs and the access code. After entering and confirming the access code, the client activates the subscription service, which can be unsubscribed at any time about which the client will be also notified. The customer cannot register twice for the same service he is already in. MT is divided into rates - subscription (one-time pay) and renewals (multiple pays). If the given mobile operator doesn't support the MT model or the specific user has blocked subscriptions, the payment is automatically exchanged (after entering the number by the customer) on the MO model;
- MO â it is SMS Premium, where the client sends a text message to the given number and gets a one-time payment depending on the selected rate (our commission is about 35% of the SMS price);
- IVR â itâs a paid call, where the client calls the number given by us and dials our internal number and we receive remuneration for every second of the call. The internal number is our identifier - based on the internal number chosen by the client, the system knows who to allocate the commission for the call. The customer must have sufficient funds on the account to connect to the premium number;
- SMS CHAT is a repeated SMS PREMIUM, where the client sends text messages to the given number and receives answers (conversation via text messages). For each message sent by the client (during the whole conversation), we receive a commission. The customer needs to have the appropriate amount of funds in the account at the time of sending SMS.
Other terms that any MyLead publisher will need to know:
- Branding â building brand awareness, for example, through banner campaigns;
- Cloaking â hiding partner links or pages (for example, through "serving" search engine robots a different version of the page);
- Cookie stuffing â abuse used by dishonest partners; tossing cookies to unsuspecting Internet users to obtain a commission;Â
- CTR (Click-Through Ratio) â indicator defining the ratio of users entering a particular link to all users visiting the site with this link;
- Active income â income requiring work, ending in the event of discontinuation of work;
- Passive income â income not requiring work (for example, gained from a ready, positioned website or from actively operating referrals in a given service), lasting despite the end of own activities;
- FP â fanpage on Facebook, âfacebook pageâ;
- YT â YouTube.com service;
- Fraud â commission obtained inconsistent with the regulations of a given partner program;
- Conversion â takes place when someone performs the most-anticipated action on the landing page you are promoting (the most-anticipated action could be, for example, sending a Premium SMS, registering an account, downloading a file, and other);
- Landing page â an advertising page that aims at the highest conversion possible;
- Lead â is the person who left the data/correctly filled in the contact form on the sales page;
- Niche â a segment (part) of the market characterized by specific needs of potential customers;
- PP â short for partner program or PayPal;
- Referral â a person registered from our reflink;
- Reflink â a unique affiliate link used to promote website/goods/services or search for referrals;
- ROI (Return on Investment) âReturn on Investment - an indicator defining the percentage return on investment; formula: (revenue - cost)/cost*100%;
- Motivated traffic â the opposite of natural movement; in the vast majority of partner programs, this is a forbidden practice of offering money or other goods in exchange for using your affiliate link (motivating to act - âdo X, and in return, I will give you Yâ);
- S4S (share for share) â share for share - promotion method (for example, a fan page on Facebook);
- SCAM â a dishonest earning service, fraud;
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) â processes to increase the visibility of the website in search engines: in addition to organic SEO, it also includes paid search results (ads displayed in results);
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) â processes used to improve the position of the website in search engines; we distinguish the methods of âwhite hatâ (consistent with search engine regulations), âblack hatâ (inconsistent with search engine regulations), and âgrey hatâ (mix of regular and non-regular practices);
- Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) â processes to improve the image in search results; SEM + SEO + activities aimed at removing negative reviews from search results;
- Search Engine Results Page (SERP) â page of results on which the analyzed page appears; commonly, the position in the search engine;
- Affiliate network â a service that is an intermediary between advertiser and partner (marketer);
- Spam â email/message/content containing commercial information on which the addressee did not agree;
- Referrals system â a system that allows you to recommend a partner program and recruit new partners in exchange for a percentage commission;
- UU (Unique User) â a unique user visiting a particular website;
- Viral â viral advertising; an advert encouraging or forcing users to perform a âviral actionâ, i.e. further advertising of the website (usually through social media).
Any additional questions? Contact us.
This guide is a collection of absolutely basics information about affiliate marketing. We donât want to overwhelm you with too much knowledge at the beginning of your journey. We believe that what has been explained here will help you get started with affiliate marketing. Good luck!Â