Creating A Passive Income with SaaS Affiliate Marketing in 2019

Affiliate Marketing in A Nutshell

Affiliate marketing is a type of paid for performance marketing whereby promoting an advertiser also called merchant, the affiliate gets paid a commission once a sale has been made for their product or service.

After joining an affiliate program, the person running for example a website or blog becomes the affiliate website where banners are displayed, or content is added about the services on offer. The affiliate then monetizes his website traffic, newsletter database or social media followers by adding the advertiser’s banners, promotions and offers with a tracking link from the affiliate program and in this way gets rewarded for his marketing efforts.

Types of Affiliate Marketers

Webmasters – These are website owners that create and run their own sites and target one or several marketing niches for example electronics, fashion or retail and in general they join several affiliate networks like Awin, Commission Junction, Rakuten or any other network. They promote the advertiser’s products and services with banners, text links, advertorials and content to drive traffic.

Search Affiliates – Are individuals who are experts with planning, implementing and running Pay Per Click search campaigns with Google, Facebook or any other search engines. They specialise with running large keyword search campaigns by testing different ad groups and looking to generate a positive ROI to their advertising budget.

Bloggers – Promote the advertiser’s products via product reviews and product descriptions in their regular blog updates with the advantage that this content tends to rank well with the search engines.

Email Marketers – These types of affiliates use email databases to send newsletter offers to an existing customer base of registered users or purchase a lead list that have opted in to receive promotional offers.

Cashback Websites – Is an affiliate website that rewards its users or members by paying them a percentage of the money earned when they purchase goods and services via its affiliate links.

Coupon Websites – These advertising sites use their large customer databases to target them with regular coupon deals and also featured unique promo codes and coupons in their merchant pages.

So, How Do you Become a SaaS Affiliate?

Adding one our banners or promotional text link to your affiliate website or affiliate blog is very simple. Just login to your affiliate account, visit the banners and links section, copy and paste the banner code in your website to get the banner displayed and start driving traffic and sales to your affiliate account!

Making Money with a SaaS Affiliate Program

Today, most affiliates promote the same old products and services that many affiliates have been promoting for the past 20 years via the traditional affiliate networks such as Awin, Commission Junction and Tradedoubler.

However, affiliates should move away from these traditional merchants and start promoting SaaS affiliate programs instead.

One of the main reasons to start marketing SaaS affiliate programs is that is a growing industry offering new and innovative digital services and therefore there is not much competition at the moment. It also means that currently media costs are low, offering affiliates an opportunity to run PPC campaigns with search engines and drive additional traffic to the affiliate website cheaply.
Another great advantage of running affiliate marketing campaigns for SaaS affiliate programs is that they pay recurring lifetime commissions. So, a customer that you acquire today and keeps renewing his subscription will keep earning you commissions every time they renew their purchase for life!

Ideas for Success When Joining a SaaS Affiliate Marketing Program

Be patient and persistent – Affiliate marketing is a continuous learning process, read as much as you can from all the sources online, follow affiliate forums and affiliate blogs and apply the marketing techniques learnt to your affiliate website.

Get to know your SaaS product or service – Spend time learning about the product or service that you are about to promote, get to know its main product features, and also the market that it serves.

Promote your affiliate site with different traffic sources – The first thing you should do once you have signed up with an affiliate program is to add the banners or text links into your affiliate site or affiliate blog. Another great way to promote a service is to write a product review of at least 500 words and adding your tracking link in order to get paid your affiliate commission. Writing original, new, and regular content is the best way to drive organic traffic from the search engines and in particular Google to your website.

You can also drive traffic by building your social media following with Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram, this is a free way of getting traffic and also helps to get your name out there. If you decide to invest money in marketing, Google Adwords is a great way of getting targeted traffic to your site, setting up an Ad in Google is very straightforward, and you just copy and paste the tracking link from your affiliate account into Google to track sales and commissions.

Finally, you must test, track, and measure your marketing efforts.