Affiliate marketing made simple

A lot of misconceptions have been flying around on what affiliate marketing is. I have decided to write this article to clear air on what it means and how you can earn well through it and through Expertnaire.

To start with, what does affiliate marketing means?

Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in which a company compensates third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services.

The third-party publishers are affiliates, and the commission fee incentivizes them to find ways to promote the company. In simple words, it means Company 'A' needs leads or product sales. Then they recruit marketers to help them get those leads or product sales and pay them a percentage for each lead or sale that they make.

There are three major types of affiliate marketing :

• Cost per lead (CPL) - This is when an affiliate is paid based on each lead he is able to generate for a company. Lead(s) mean potential buyers.

• Revenue share - This is a business model where the company shares the overall revenue with an affiliate based on the customers the affiliate referred to the company.

• Cost per sale - This is the type of affiliate program run by sites like Amazon, Expertnaire, Clickbank ,etc. With cost per sale, affiliates are paid a certain amount of commission based on each product sale they generate. These can be digital or physical products. Digital products are products that can be delivered electronically - E.g. Software, online courses, ebooks, audios etc. Physical products are products that have to be shipped to the customer - E.g. phones, clothes, electronics, shoes etc.

The type of affiliate we will focus on is the cost per sale type for the sake of this article.

The amount of commission an affiliate gets per product sale is set by the merchant that owns the product.

So, let's say a merchant sells a bottle of perfume X for N20,000. The merchant can decide to pay affiliates 10% of each perfume sale. The affiliate helps the merchant by helping him get a sale & a customer & the merchant rewards the affiliate with a commission per product sale. What this means is - The affiliate doesn’t have to produce or import any product. They don't even have to deliver it to the customer. All they do is to refer a customer and get paid.

Now, how long has affiliate marketing being around online? Or is it something new?

Affiliate marketing as a way of business has been around for a long time. But according to Wikipedia, the concept of online affiliate marketing was conceived of, put into practice and patented by William J. Tobin, the founder of PC Flowers & Gifts in Nov 1994, almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web. Amazon.com is one of the companies that adopted the concept of affiliate marketing earlier and it boosted their sales.

Now, what is expertnaire?

Expertnaire is an online digital marketplace where creators of digital products (books, tutorials, courses etc.) can get more sales for their products via the help of affiliates.

So, what this means is that on Expertnaire,there are creators (also known as vendors) - These are people who own digital products & are looking for sales. Then we have affiliates who are willing to help the vendors get sales and they (the affiliates) get a commission per sale.

The Expertnaire platform bridges the gap between these two parties. Expertnaire makes it easy for an affiliate to have access to various products from different merchants. The Expertnaire platform takes care of the sales tracking and reporting so that no party is cheated. Expertnaire also takes care of customer support, product delivery and other little issues that might come up. So, this is an overview of how it works.

A vendor (someone who owns a digital product) lists their product on Expertnaire. He provides the price for the product & how much commission he is willing to pay per sale. An affiliate (someone willing to make money by selling the products in exchange for the commission) looks through the affiliate platform & picks one or more products they want to promote. The affiliate then goes ahead to promote the product(s) using his affiliate link (a unique link that makes it easy for the Expertnaire system to track which affiliate made the sale). When the affiliate promotes the product, a potential buyer sees it, and then clicks on the affiliate link to check out the details of the product. If it is something the person is interested in, they go ahead to buy it. Once there is a purchase, both the vendor & affiliate gets notified via mail with their percentage for the sale. The Expertnaire system detects which affiliate referred the sale & the affiliate gets the specific commission for that product in their Expertnaire affiliate account. Expertnaire pays out whichever amount the affiliate has in their PAYOUT section on Fridays.

It is as simple as that.

Unlike many platforms, Expertnaire places a strong emphasis on high quality digital products. Before a vendor can list a product on Expertnaire, the product goes through some tough scrutiny to ensure that it is valuable for the buyer and to also ensure that it is promising for the affiliates who might want to promote it. Right now, there are over 60 high value digital products on the Expertnaire platform and the product owners (vendors) offer affiliates between 30 - 90% commission per product sale. Most actually offer 50%. This hefty commission per sale is why many who want to make money as an affiliate prefer to promote the products on Expertnaire.

In order to become an affiliate on Expertnaire & start promoting any of the products on the platform, a N10k yearly registration fee is required. All these is done on the Expertnaire.com website.

Thanks for reading through and I hope you gained a lot.