New to Affiliate Marketing? AdsBridge is your perfect tracking solution

Affiliate marketing is one of the most exciting and profitable industries to be in. Unfortunately for many people who are looking to get started, the concept of affiliate marketing and not knowing how to effectively create and promote an ad campaign can be quite frustrating. This usually leads to new affiliate marketers getting frustrated and quickly leaving the industry, strictly because they did not have the guidance or patience to work through it.

Having created one of the easiest and most powerful platforms in the industry for creating and managing ad campaigns, we understand your frustration and want you to find success in the world of affiliate marketing. Not only have we created an easy to use landing page builder and ad tracking platform, we’ve also made it extremely easy for new affiliate marketers to get setup and start tracking their campaigns without the need to spend a lot of money in the process.

AdsBridge created a special membership level at just $19 per month for newbie affiliate marketers, which allows up 100,000 visits/clicks per month, access to our traffic distribution system, our landing page editor and much more.

Before showing you how to create killer landing pages and setup your ad tracking for maximum results through AdsBridge, we  want to first dive into the world of affiliate marketing, show you how it works, explain the different types of traffic methods out there and how you can use AdsBridge to build a successful, profitable and longterm business in the process.

What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does It Work?

Affiliate marketing is the concept of getting paid a commission in exchange for generating a lead or sale through your affiliate link. This can be done through web site links, search traffic, banners and many other advertising methods. As an affiliate marketer, it’s your job to figure out how to generate high quality leads for less than the amount you are paying for traffic. The difference would then be your profit margin.

There are four players in the world of affiliate marketing:

1. Affiliate / Publisher – The affiliate or publisher, is a site owner or marketer who is using affiliate marketing methods to drive traffic, leads and sales to an advertiser’s web site or lead gen form.
2. Affiliate Network – An affiliate network is a site that houses a wide range of affiliate offers, while also handling all tracking, payments and management of affiliates and advertisers.
3. Advertiser / Brand –  The advertiser is the site, brand or business that is paying for leads to be generated to their site.
4. Traffic Source – Traffic to your affiliate links and ad campaigns can be from a wide range of sources. Through the use of ad networks, you can manage your ad campaigns, targeting and advertising budget.

Here’s a quick scenario of how affiliate marketing might work, while also mentioning the affiliate network and advertiser as well.

Tom runs a credit score information site that helps people learn how to increase their credit score and better manage their finances. Tom realizes he is getting a lot traffic to his site and would like to make money someone. Through the use of affiliate marketing, Tom decides to join an affiliate network, where he finds an offer for a “free credit report”. Whenever someone clicks on his unique affiliate link, and completes a free credit report through the advertise, Tom would then receive a commission. All clicks, leads and commissions would be tracked through the affiliate network, so both the advertiser and affiliate can track performance and earnings. At the end of the month, Tom would receive a check or payment for all legitimate leads delivered through his site and using his affiliate link.

This was a generic example of how affiliate marketing works, but there are many other ways to make money with affiliate offers as well — especially with different paid traffic sources.

Different Traffic Sources for Affiliate Marketing

In the early days of affiliate marketing, most traffic and leads were being delivered through web sites, search engines and email. As the internet continues to grow in sizes and reach, new sources of traffic like social networks and mobile are increasing by leaps and bounds every year, which means it’s now more important than ever before for both affiliates and advertisers to track where leads are coming from and what sources are converting best. In reference to different traffic sources, below you will find five of the most common methods used in affiliate marketing.

• Paid Search – Google, Yahoo and Bing all sell advertising within their search results based on selected keywords and phrases advertisers might want to rank for. Advertisers pay for these placements on a cost per click (CPC) basis.
• Media Buying – The concept of buying banner ads and/or pop under advertising across various sites is referred to as media buying. Advertising on sites through this method is usually sold on a cost per 1,000 views (CPM) basis.
• Web Sites / Content Creation – Whether it’s through paid search or organic listings, content is one of the best ways to convert an audience into valuable leads. When using content marketing to generate revenue, this is usually done through the use of text links within the content or banner ads placed on a site.
• Facebook Ads – Social networks offer highly targeted advertising through the use of their user demographics. Facebook has their own self-serve advertising platform that allows advertisers to create campaigns while also targeting their exact demographic audience and allowing them to buy advertising on both a CPM and CPC basis.
• Mobile Advertising – More people are using their mobile and tablet devices to browse the internet than ever before. There are multiple advertising networks catered specifically to mobile advertising, while other platforms such as Facebook Ads and search marketing (Google Adwords) also have mobile advertising capabilities available.

No matter what advertising method you use, it’s important to make sure you are tracking all traffic, leads, and costs to make sure you know where your leads are coming from and to measure your return on investment.

The Importance of Landing Page in Affiliate Marketing

When promoting an affiliate offer, you have two options;

1. Send traffic directly to your affiliate offer link
2. Create a landing page that features your affiliate offer link

A landing page is a custom pre-sell page that a user is sent to before they are sent to the actual lead generation or advertiser page.

Nearly all successful affiliate marketers are using landing pages to increase earnings and scale their campaigns. Landing pages are not only important for creating highly detailed pre-sell pages for your demographic audience, but they are also a requirement for many traffic sources and advertising platforms out there. For example, if you wanted to promote an affiliate offer through paid search and Google Adwords, you would need to create a landing page for your campaign, as they do not allow direct linking to an affiliate offer.

In the next chapter of this guide, we will be covering everything you need to know about landing pages and how to easily create your own landing pages through AdsBridge’s editor.

Why Every Affiliate Marketer Must Use Advanced Online Tracking

In addition to using an affiliate network to track clicks, leads and conversions, it’s also extremely important to track these same statistics on your end as well. There are many reasons to track your own campaign stats, such as having your own set of stats to compare against your affiliate network and most importantly, to perform your own detailed tracking and stats analysis on your own campaigns as well.

Most affiliate networks will provide you with an affiliate link for each offer you want to promote, but you are limited on the amount of data you can actually track through that link and the affiliate network itself. By setting up and managing your ad campaigns through AdsBridge, you have the ability to test, track and analyze every aspect of your landing page, while also integrating your preferred affiliate network in the process.

In an upcoming chapter in this affiliate guide series, we will walk you through the process of how to setup and track your ad campaigns through AdsBridge.

More to come…

We understand there is a lot to cover in the world of affiliate marketing. Especially if you are in the process of creating your first ad campaign. This was the introductory post in our affiliate marketing guide series and in the new few chapters we will be diving into the importance of landing pages and how to properly track, analyze and manage your campaign data to increase profitability.

In the meantime, we invite you to join AdsBridge, so you can get familiar with our platform, while also allowing you to start tracking your campaigns like never before. Should you have any questions or comments along the way, be sure to view our help center that is loaded with tons of free videos and tutorials, or you can also contact us at any time.