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Affiliate marketing for beginners

Affiliate marketing is a sector of online marketing, and the largest one at that. It encompasses all online ads at once and connects millions of webmasters with billions of people around the world.

Each year, the number of people wanting to try their luck in the industry is only growing. That’s why in today’s article from the Neogara Club, we’re going to discuss in detail what affiliate marketing is, why it’s worth your time and where exactly should you start. Let’s get started!

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing implies making money on promoting specific products before a wide online target audience. In short, a webmaster (you) shows Internet users ads. The latter is either already interested or gradually becoming curious about the product and purchases it and that’s the action that lets the advertiser turn a profit, part of which they relinquish to the affiliate.

Moreover, there can be lots of such actions, ranging from a simple click on an ad banner to a full-fledged purchase of an offer. We'll talk about this in more detail a little later. And finally, let’s just clarify that the term “advertisement” is interchangeable with “traffic”, which you might have noticed from the second word of today’s article.

Why should you engage in affiliate marketing?

First of all, it is worth trying yourself in this direction because of how much variety it offers. Many potential affiliates give up almost immediately because they are afraid to lose money or immediately fail to find an approach to their audience and ways to properly work with different ad formats.

In reality though, you won’t run into any budget problems – you can start off with a mere $100. Specifically for beginners, there’s a bunch of programs and ad distribution sources, etc. As for the theoretical component, there’s an abundance of affiliate marketing guides out there, complete with not just term definitions but also case breakdowns and a step-by-step tutorial on how to start making money. All you have to do is follow these instructions
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Your first steps in affiliate marketing

Choosing a vertical

At the very beginning, you need to decide which advertising direction you want to work with the most:

Nutra. Works with cosmetics - products for smoothing the skin, getting rid of wrinkles, inflammation, and so on. It may also include weight-loss or muscle-growth products, drugs for the treating cardiovascular problems, prostatitis and a number of other more serious diseases.

Finances. The vertical can be divided into two large categories - finance itself and the cryptocurrency sector. The former includes banking products (credit or debit cards, mortgages or consumer loans) and insurance services.

Gambling. Aimed at promoting casinos and similar gambling establishments. A lucrative option, since some GEOs are ready to spend literally thousands of dollars every day, ensuring the webmaster receives quite a nice cut.

Betting. Another gambling vertical but one that is entirely dedicated to sports bets. Keep in mind that each country has its own favorite sports and how well you adjust to the GEO will determine the success of your ad campaign.

Adult. Ads for adult products, which include potency and sexual sensation-enhancing goods, porn websites and so on.

E-commerce. An all-encompassing vertical that deals with the sales of ordinary online goods. Bikes and sports equipment, groceries, household appliances and much more – all this can be promoted via affiliate marketing.

Dating. A vertical of dating websites and apps, where the target action is registering on the website or downloading the app.

Although there are indeed many verticals, not all of them are universally suitable for any GEO.

Choosing an offer

The next step is to decide what ad offer you’ll be promoting. But allow us to first make a small digression. You don’t just directly contact an advertiser and offer your services, instead you register with special affiliate services that interact with hundreds of advertisers for you.

Essentially, affiliate programs act as an intermediary between the advertiser and the affiliate. They also provide the latter with different work bonuses, help them resolve disputes with advertisers, prepare materials to use in campaigns, provide lucrative offers and so on. And the reason advertisers are interested in working with APs is because the latter provide them with quality ads and a stable influx of clients.

Your job is to pick an honest top-tier affiliate network, register with it and get a personal manager - your liaison officer for the affiliate program, if you will. They will let you choose from an array of fresh offers and provide tips regarding ad campaign launches if you aren’t sure about something.

Choosing a traffic source

Once you enter most of the initial data, you can move on to picking a specific source to launch your ad campaign from. They can all be divided into several categories:

Social media. This group can be divided into two more subgroups, with the first one tailored specifically for the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet and the other for all the other GEOs or both RU and Tier 1-2 GEOs. The first subgroup includes platforms like Odnoklassniki and VKontakte. And the second - Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. Some of the previously mentioned options have also been adapted for the RU segment and will perform equally well in either subgroup.

Contextual ads. The same subgroup division applies here, but there are 2 major sources here, the first is Yandex.Direct (only for the RU segment) and the second is Google Ads (for everyone else).

Push notifications. As the name implies, this ad format utilizes pushes - small notifications, which the target audience agrees to receive and gets offers to purchase the promoted products.

Native ads. A standard campaign format, except here the ad must organically blend into the surrounding content. It mustn’t stand out or attract too much attention.

Teasers. Somewhat similar to push notifications, but more bright and viral, and also more focused on clicks and transitions, rather than product purchases and the sort. An excellent example of a teaser ad would be “This remedy will rid you off … in just 1 day!”. T

Play Market and AppStore apps. A unique format that can be adapted to any vertical and GEO, because it involves displaying ads in mobile apps.

Purchasing software and preparing materials

The last step before creating an ad campaign is acquiring the necessary tools and using them to create a bundle - a set of materials you’ll use for your promotion.
Let’s start by dividing all offers into white-, gray- and black-hat. The first category is completely allowed by all traffic sources and has no restrictions. The second category is partially tabooed and requires you use additional tools to bypass the restrictions and the same goes for the third category.

Allow us to clarify - nothing’s stopping you from working only with white-hat offers without having to allocate any funds for additional tools:

An anti-detect browser. This tool is needed to make sure you remain anonymous when going online. It also lets you work with dozens of different personalities, significantly increasing the number of ACs (ad campaigns) you can launch and the volume of traffic you can attract.

Proxies. These act as a standard expendable and a sort-of addition to the antidetect browser, the one you’ll be using to switch between from one “personality” to another.

Payment info. When launching ad campaigns, you’ll need to spend money on purchasing and driving traffic but you need to do it properly. For now, just remember that each social media profile or any other traffic source requires you to have separate payment details.

Landing pages. A one-page website where you drive your target audience after warming it up in the source itself. Technically, you can “borrow” it from other affiliates either entirely or parts of it.

Creatives. The bulk of your materials consisting of visuals and text. The first is done mainly in Photoshop, while the second you come up with yourself and it must be so interesting to a client to be near-literally mind-blowing.

Accounts. Regular profiles that are mainly needed for social media and that lets you launch ad campaigns behind the mask of different personalities.

Spy tools. A kind of idea generators for affiliates - they allow you to view ads already posted by other webmasters, as well as sort them depending on the vertical, target audience parameters, GEO, language and many other equally interesting filters.

Trackers. They allow you to track the path of a potential client from clicking on a banner to finalizing their purchase. What’s the point of knowing this information? Simple – first of all, since even a single campaign can include dozens of banners, it’s important to understand which of them serve to attract lots of clients and which should best be disabled. Second, after your AC is done you must analyze it and draw conclusions about the work done and only trackers enable you to do that effectively.


Summing up

In today’s article, we’ve covered in detail what affiliate marketing is and why this industry is so interesting and financially promising. We talked about the different ways to work with ads, the principles behind driving traffic and the tools you’ll need to launch your first ad campaign.

But more than that, this is only the start of our training guides and if you enjoyed reading about this industry, welcome to the Neogara affiliate network! High payouts, the best crypto offers on the market and working with any sort of GEOs – this is but a fraction of what we offer our partners.

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