Affiliate Marketing VS Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is a broad term and Affiliate Marketing is a branch within digital marketing.

Both are constantly evolving as technology continues to advance and learning how to do them correctly can be a very valuable skill whether you’re planning on starting your own online business or looking to work for a company as more and more businesses are moving their marketing online and steering away from traditional methods like radio and billboard.

The main difference between Affiliate Marketing and Digital Marketing is that digital marketing encompasses any type of advertising online whether you’re marketing your own products, someone else’s, or even offering digital marketing to business owners as a service.

Whereas Affiliate Marketing is strictly promoting someone else’s product and receiving a commission whenever someone purchases through your unique link.

Affiliate Marketing VS Digital Marketing
What Is Affiliate Marketing?

In simple terms, Affiliate Marketing is promoting someone else’s product and receiving a commission when someone purchases through you.

Very similar to your local bank offering you $100 dollars for every person you can get to sign up for a savings account.

It operates on the same pay structure as a real estate agent or a car salesman.

Upon making a sale, you’ll receive a commission.

The beauty of being an Affiliate Marketer is that you aren’t restricted to a certain type of product or even a specific industry.

How To Become An Affiliate Marketer?

Becoming an affiliate for products is actually quite simple.

And most of the time there are companies and websites that offer affiliate programs and people who aren’t looking for that information would never even notice.

For example, if a company offers an affiliate program.

You can usually find it mixed in with all the other options at the bottom of the website.

Alternatively, you could always just Google the company with the term “Affiliate Program” To find out if they have one.

Then it usually just consists of you inputting the following information

Name
Email Address
Address
SSN or Tax ID Number
Preferred Payment Method (Check/Paypal)

Depending on the company that you’re signing up for you’ll either be taken to an affiliate center immediately or there will be a screening process.

Most affiliate centers will provide you with images/banners that can be used to promote the product as well as having some email templates and text form you that can be used as promotional tools.

At first, it would seem like a great idea to jump into programs that don’t have waiting times and to use the resources that most companies offer, but if you’re looking to make a full-time income through affiliate marketing I would recommend going with programs that are actually more strict on who can become an affiliate.

And by adding your own personal spin on the resources they offer. As it will cause to you stand out from others and sometimes networks that allow anyone to join the program can be saturated with people who’re spamming affiliate links everywhere they can.

Which will automatically put you in the same category as them, making it more difficult for you to be successful before you even start!

Below are a couple of websites that are dedicated networks for affiliate marketing. Where vendors/product owners list their things throughout every industry.

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What Types Of Affiliate Programs Should You Join?

When I say what type of programs should you join I’m not talking about whether the program is promoting physical products or digital products or even what industry it is in.

I’m talking about the pay structure.

There are only 2 types of programs that I ever join and put effort into promoting, and I would highly recommend doing the same.

High Ticket Programs | A high ticket program is something that would cost $500+ and the commission is around 25% you would receive $125 per sale. The amount you’ll make can significantly grow if you promote products that are even more expensive as I’ve seen people affiliates receiving commissions as high as $500 per sale. The reason for promoting products like this over low ticket offers, is it actually takes just as much effort as an affiliate marketer to get a potential customer to purchase.
Recurring Affiliate Programs | My personal favorite is affiliate programs that offer recurring commissions. Which are found in software companies or businesses that offer a subscription-based service. Say for example I referred someone to an email automation software that costs $100 per month and they have a 40% commission payout. I would receive $40 per person that I got to sign up. Now with a singular person that doesn’t seem like very much, but it can really start to add up and compound, having 100 people signed up through your affiliate link would result in you having $4,000 commission every month when those people pay their bill for as long as they use that software.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing can be summarized as any form of marketing that is done online.

Whether it is on social media, through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing, if it’s Pay Per Click or if it’s organic “Free” traffic, content marketing, social media marketing, and even affiliate marketing can all be categorized into digital marketing as it is very broad and encompasses a vast amount of places that you could potentially market yourself or your product.

The Main Categories Of Digital Marketing
Search Engine Optimization

Also known as SEO is the art of ranking a website on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

So whenever someone searched “How To Start Affiliate Marketing” Your website would appear at the top of the search results (Below the Ads)

This is probably the oldest form of digital marketing, as it has been used ever since search engines have been prevalent.

Not that the methods of getting your website to appear at the top of the search results are the same but the effectiveness of having a website ranking is just as important today as it was a decade ago if not more.

That is because as more and more avenues open up online people are steering away from SEO and relying more on social media and other online channels, however, ranking on the search engines can have higher conversion rates because the customer is actually searching for something vs you interrupting their experience with an advertisement before their Youtube video or as they’re scrolling through their Facebook feed.

This method is a lot slower than other forms of digital marketing and can take quite a bit of time before you’re actually seeing a significant amount of traffic from, but it could be viewed as a snowball effect.

Once your starting to see the traffic it will just start to compound and add up.

The caveat to it taking so long is that it can virtually be done for free.

Check Out This Article: How To Start A Blog With WordPress | Easy Step By Step Guide For 2020

Search Ads

This form of digital marketing is very similar to ranking your website on the search engines, but it’s expedited because in a sense you’re paying to be placed at the top of the search results.

As you can see in the image above, I Googled “Email Marketing” and the first 4 Results are Paid Advertisements.

These are what are known as Search Ads which are are only going to show up based on specific search terms made by the potential customer.

These are powerful because unlike traditional forms of advertisements like radio or billboards, you have the ability to only show your advertisements to people who’ve shown that they’re interested.

Most search engine companies also offer free coupons when you first start advertising on their platform which is a bonus!

I think both Google and Bing match $100 ad spend for new users!

Social Media Marketing

With the number of active people on social media daily it has become one of the most powerful places for you to advertise on if done correctly.

If you weren’t aware, social media does track all of your interests, the posts you like, the types of videos you watch, and even the external websites that you’ve visited.

This ultimately revolutionized things from a marketer’s perspective because it’s given us the ability to create advertisements and convey them to the customers as if it was created personally for them instead of having a cookie-cutter type of advertisement that will only suite a portion of the potential customers.

Social media marketing also introduced a form of retargeting advertising that is EXTREMELY effective.

If you’ve ever been on a website looking at something and upon opening your social media you see an advertisement for that exact item you were looking at that is a retargeting advertisement.

And they’re very effective and cheap because the person seeing the advertisement has already shown interest in whatever it is you’re promoting and social media companies charge pennies for these types of advertisements because it requires you to already have some type of contact with the potential customer. So it’s viewed as if you own the rights to that data.

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Email Marketing

One of the most commonly used throughout every industry and has been a relevant form of digital marketing since the 1990s.

Terms like “The Money Is In The List” is referring to the amount of money Is dependant on the size of your email list.

Very commonly used throughout big corporate companies and little mom and pop shops and is still just as effective as it was 30 years ago.

Your ability to craft email marketing campaigns that are personalized based on the interactions your list is having with your emails is getting more and more advanced.

And you can automate the majority of the process which makes it a breeze from business owners or marketers perspective.

Instead of having to write hundreds of emails, crafting, and personalizing them as you go, you can write it once and it can be personalized to your potential customers based on their interaction or over the course of time.

Everything “sends an email instantly, Wait 24 hours, If opened, or clicked a link within the email,” can all be used to personalize and create effective email marketing campaigns.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is where you’re creating content to build a targeted audience.

Things such as Blogging, Youtube, and Social Media Influencers could fall into a content marketing category.

You’ll need to be continuously creating relevant content for your audience to build an engaged customer base, but upon doing so doing something as simple as writing an article, making a post or video could have a significant amount of traction once you’ve built your following.

Check Out Another Post By Me: Affiliate Marketing Vs Network Marketing | What’s The Difference?

How To Start Digital Marketing?

Sadly starting digital marketing isn’t as easy as signing up for an affiliate program.

I’ve touched on the main categories of digital marketing but within these categories, there is a huge learning curve and they’re so multi-faceted that I couldn’t even cover everything within one category on a single blog post even if I wanted to.

With that being said I would Focus Strictly on perfecting and learning one form of digital marketing, and then moving onto the next.

As they all can be intertwined together and accent and make another more effective, but trying to learn all of them at once can be extremely daunting.

Places that you can learn various forms of digital marketing

Udemy | Platform where you can take online courses in just about anything you could imagine, Including Digital Marketing
Kevin David Facebook Ad | If you’ve been in the online space or have looked into making any money online you’ve probably seen something by Kevin David somewhere. He has an entire Facebook advertising masterclass which even teaches you how to sell it as a service and make a full-time business out of it.
Fundamentals Of Digital Marketing By Google | Google offers a course comprised of 26 different modules on digital marketing.
HubSpot Content Marketing | A free 6 Hour Course that will teach you about effective content marketing and how to do it yourself!

Affiliate Marketing VS Digital Marketing | Why Learn Digital Marketing?

The demand for people who’re skilled digital marketers is growing rapidly and is only going to continue to become even more in demand as technologies continue to advance.

Whether you’re going to learn digital marketing to promote a business you own, someone else’s products as an affiliate, or even sell it as a service to someone else.

It is a very high-income skill to have, Business owners, will pay significant amounts for digital marketing services, as advertising is the lifeblood of every business and the majority of them don’t have any idea what they’re doing online.

You can use it to promote affiliate products that offer recurring commissions, so you can build a true form of passive income, and spend your days doing what you want while making money!

Here is a list of my favorite affiliate programs with recurring commissions! Ultimate Recurring Affiliate List

Affiliate Marketing VS Digital Marketing | Summary

The main difference between the two is that affiliate marketing is a specific sub-section that would fall into a form of digital marketing.

As digital marketing encompasses so many different variables and stretches across a plethora of platforms.

Utilizing your digital marketing skills to promote other people’s products as an affiliate marketer is by far one of my favorite ways to create income online, and can become a true form of passive income if done correctly.

Affiliate Marketing VS Digital Marketing | How’re They Different?