How Merchants Affects Affiliate Marketing Performance

As a website owner or a blogger, embedding affiliate links or banners on your website is one of the most lucrative ways to monetize your site and earn that extra income. Some websites generate substantial amounts of commission from affiliate banners. Therefore, acquiring the prerequisite knowledge on how to choose the right affiliate merchant’s banner or link to display on your site is quite crucial and it is an important factor in determining how successful a blogger can become.

Curating interesting and professional content on your blog is very important, because content is king in digital marketing. One of the ways digital marketers make additional income is by getting subscribers to pay for eBook downloads or register for webinars. Affiliate links and banners remains a powerful means to attract readers to websites that offer products and services with related content, which are often pecially recommended by the experts also referred to as influencers.

There are several merchant products and service providers on various affiliate programmes. Choosing the right affiliate programme is one thing and knowing the advertisers that pay higher commissions and produces high conversion rates is another. Affiliate links and banners with higher commission is important, but what is even more important is higher conversion rate.

Banners with higher conversion rates generate higher income then those that offer higher commission. Building the right relationships with advertisers, ensuring you have the right partners in your program and constantly updating your content increases your conversion and chances of earning higher commission.

High paying affiliate links are quite effective when they embedded in your content, particularly when they are used as keywords. Banners are also used intermittently within the article to draw attention of the reader to the to a product or services of an affiliate merchant. Many successful bloggers have made substantial amounts of money just promoting links and banners of advertisers on their blogs or websites. The success of affiliate marketers depends largely on networking and building relationships.

Averagely, bloggers make from between $1,000 to $14,000,000 depending on the content type and the popularity of the blogger. Arriana Huffington, the legendary blogger and owner of the Huffington Post, makes a staggering $14,000,000 per month and is rated as the world’s #1 blogging site in 2017 by Forbes.

Reports in NetImperative show that revenue from affiliate marketing globally, increased by 16% in 2017, and increased by an average of 4% in number of orders. The global forecast of the Affiliate Marketing Industry shows that revenue in the sector will grow as high as $6.8 Billion in 2022. This growth is stimulated by increasing number of supermarkets and malls now opening online stores.

“Affiliate marketing is a high-value, low-risk strategy proven to drive sales and awareness for brands and revenue for publishers,” said Adam Weiss, General Manager and Senior Vice President of Rakuten Affiliate Network, one of the world's largest affiliate network. “When done right, it cultivates mutually beneficial and authentic relationships between brands and publishers, and those publishers and their audience.”

The top earners in the blogging sector in 2017 are Huffington Post, Engadget, Moz, Mashable, TechCrunch and CopBlogger. Leading the pack is Huffington Post, the number one blogging site in the world, which provides very liberal view on life and politics, records an average monthly revenue of $14,000,000. The site, which is owned by legendary Arriana Huffington's was sold to AOL for $315 million in 2011.

Engadget is a technology and consumer electronics site and one of the first blogging sites to be acquired by AOL in 2005. The site is the second richest with a monthly revenue of $5,500,000. Rand Fishkin, who is the owner of Moz, the world's most successful blog about search engine optimization. Moz nets $4,250,000 per month, making it the third highest revenue earner in its category. While in fourth, fifth and sixth places respectively are Mashable with $2,000,000, TechCrunch $2,500,000 and CopyBlogger with $1,000,000 per month.

In trying to reach a decision on the most effective affiliate program to use, you must understand the importance to take into consideration the following factors, such as choosing the right advertisers, effective and transparent payment policies, higher commission per sale and effective feedback channels. Many site owners have forfeited substantial amount of money they supposed to have earned but for the poor payment policies some affiliate programmes.

Some affiliate programmes have policies that charge a fee to send you your commission checks, either by mail or by courier service, which is often optional. Others charge for returned checks, i.e. checks that did not get to their destination and was returned to them. The charges are often very high and tends to discourage site owners.