Affiliate Marketing – Common Affiliate Publisher Types

Intro

Affiliate marketing remains a solid method of making money online.

It is a strategy that people have been using since the early days of the internet, and as long as products or services have been sold online, there have been affiliates around to promote them.

The basic way in which affiliate marketing works is that an individual promotes products or services on behalf of a company, business, or another individual. Why do they do this? Well, if they promote that product or service (through a variety of means such as blogs, social media, or ads, to name just three), and someone clicks on their affiliate link and makes a purchase, the affiliate gets paid a commission.

Publishers are vital to how affiliate marketing works, and we'll stress their importance a little later on. There are also several different publisher types, which we will also explore and explain in more detail, as these can range from writing reviews, publishing blogs, promoting on social media, or using price comparisons.

Before we get into the finer details of the main publisher types for affiliate marketing, let’s look at the important role publishers play in this marketing strategy.

Why Are Affiliate Publishers Important?

Affiliate publishers are essentially individuals who advertise the products and services of other individuals or brands. Once a specific action is achieved, such as someone clicking an affiliate link and making a purchase or generating a lead, the affiliate receives a percentage payment.

There is no one exact way to do this, which is why there are many different affiliate publisher types. This is because different products and services require different marketing methods to get the results they want.

I’m going to explain in more detail below 5 main affiliate publisher types that affiliates use to generate sales, leads, and clicks, which all lead to making money. The main publisher types that exist in affiliate marketing today are:

• Content publishers - if you run a blog or a review website and generate web content to point to an affiliate link.
• Social media - Where you post content on various social media platforms to increase engagement and drive people to the product you are promoting.
• Price comparison - These publishers operate a website that compares products and services by price and other filters to allow the visitor to find the best deal.
• Coupon and deal sites - This provides coupons and discount codes to people to save money on affiliate products.
• Email marketing - Again, these publishers create content, but instead of putting this on a website or social media, it is sent to interested people via email.

Common Affiliate Publisher Types

Web Content Publishers

We think that content publishers are among the most common methods people make money from affiliate marketing, although social media has certainly exploded in popularity due to how easy it is to get started.

This publishing type strategy involves creating blogs and other content that people come across and are relevant to the products or services that they are interested in. The way that this form of content is promoted is generally through SEO, so it is seen as a more long-term affiliate marketing strategy, as it can take a while for pages and websites to get ranked.

Let’s take an example. You have signed up to become an affiliate of health-based products. You create a website based on this niche and start creating high-quality content around health products, and maybe you have some product review blogs in there as well. This content gets picked up by Google and ranks highly on the search engine. When someone searches for information about this niche, they come across your website, read your content, and click your affiliate link.

That sounds really straightforward, but it is more complicated than that. Content publishing is a fantastic long-term strategy and allows you to establish authority in a certain realm. It does take time, though, and it can take a while to see the results.

Social Media Publishers

Social media is huge as a publishing type for several reasons.

Firstly, it is dead easy to set up a social media profile and start posting content. You don’t need to build a website or anything like that. Secondly, it can allow you to reach an audience very quickly (in comparison to website content publishing). If you create a piece of engaging content that gets liked and shared, more people will see it.

Web content publishing can take a long time for you to start to see results, whereas social media publishing is often quicker. It really does depend on how good the content is on your social media platforms, and this has become a very saturated method of generating affiliate income because of the reasons we listed above.

The good news is that if you have the skills to create videos and other social media content that is unique and gets views, you can build up an audience quickly and really cement yourself as an authoritative figure in your niche.

Price Comparison Publishers

Working with the price comparison publishing type is a great way to convert people within affiliate marketing.

The reason for this is that if someone has landed on your price comparison content, then they are already interested in buying a product within your niche. Instead of you having to convince them of the merits of the product or service, you simply need to let them filter and search for the best deal. Basically, they are already interested in the product or service, and instead, they are at the buying stage with you, as an affiliate publisher, guiding them at the last stage.

This type of publishing does have a few drawbacks, mainly being that the number one reason people use shopping comparison services is to get the best deal. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing for an affiliate, but it can eat into your profits as potential buyers will usually choose the cheapest option, which might result in less commission paid to the affiliate.

Coupon And Deal Publishers

These sites are used by affiliates to provide discounts, coupons, and promotion codes to people interested in buying certain products or signing up for a service. They have the potential to be very lucrative because, like price comparison publishing, coupon and deal publishing will attract the people who are ready to complete a purchase - they just want to see if they can get any money off before they do.

Again, these people are usually beyond the convincing stage and ready to purchase. Everyone likes a bargain, and there are countless discount shoppers out there who might just purchase a product you are promoting because there is a super deal on it.

If you are promoting a product that isn’t selling well, using a coupon or deal publishing method can help gain sales and increase traction for that product.

There is a danger that you will cheapen the brand value by continually offering deals on products (customers or potential customers will eventually ask why that product is always on sale). Also, it can be difficult to retain customers this way, as many will simply want money off a product and move on to the next one when the discount isn’t available anymore.

Email Marketing Publishers

Email for affiliate marketing is one of the original ways in which people started to make money through selling other people's products with an affiliate link, especially if you use a CPA affiliate network such as AdsEmpire or another network. Essentially, it consists of building up an email list of people who are interested in your niche or a specific product or service and creating high-quality email content to turn these people into a conversion.

We must admit, we love this kind of publishing for several reasons. The first is that your email list should already be a ready-made list of people who are interested in your niche. Don’t buy email lists because it is likely that 99% of the people on them will have no interest in what you are selling. However, if you build a targeted email list, you have fantastic opportunities to make money.

The downside is that, like web content publishing, this strategy will take a while to bear fruit, but the end results can be very lucrative.

Publisher Types To Look Out For

I’ve covered the most common publisher types for affiliate marketing, but there are a few others we want to tell you about. We would classify these as merging publishing types because they haven't got the same popularity yet.

Mobile apps have been around for a long time now but they are only starting to grow as a publisher type. This method involves pushing deals through apps (for example, fitness apps might advertise supplements to their app users).

Niche communities represent a method of promoting to highly targeted but much smaller communities. For example, sub-reddits on Reddit that are focused on one niche area, or even really niche products on social media that don’t have a huge following.

Voice search and AI are two other publishing types that are quite in the early stages of affiliate marketing, exploring the best methods to use these technologies.

Different Publishing Types Matter

So far, we have taken you through some common affiliate marketing publishing types that are well-established and have been used by marketers for years. We’ve also given you a glimpse into some emerging and lesser-known publishing methods.

The biggest piece of advice we can give you is that diversifying how you advertise in affiliate marketing is vitally important.

Don’t just focus on one of these publishing types for all your affiliate marketing. This one-size-fits-all approach is due to fail because you need a healthy mix of different strategies to ensure that you make as much profit as possible.

You might find a product or service that works well by posting long-form web content, such as blogs or reviews. Then you might choose another product to promote as an affiliate and find out that this type of publishing doesn’t work; rather, social media would be a much better fit.

You really need to consider your audience type and find out what publishing type resonates with them the best, and it could be that you need to use a mix of these strategies to get the best outcome. As with most things in affiliate marketing, reaching your audience effectively isn’t something you can just do on autopilot. You need to continually monitor what publishing types work well for certain products and what don’t, and adjust your methods accordingly.

Using The Right Publisher Type

This guide was designed to take you through the most common publishing methods that affiliate marketers are using to reach their audience, get affiliate link clicks, and generate sales and money.

A quick recap:

• Web content publishing works great for niches that people want to study in depth and it is a solid long-term strategy even though it will take a while to become established.
• Social media publishing will appeal to people who want short and snappy information and you can start making a name for yourself quite quickly in this sphere.
• Price comparison publishing is ideal for targeting people who are already at the buying stage.
• Coupon and deal publishing will attract bargain hunters who will likely buy most products if the discount is attractive enough, but it can be difficult to build brand loyalty.
• Email marketing publishing allows you to use a highly targeted list of people who are already interested in your niche.

Choosing the right publishing type depends on several factors, and we don’t think it is a good idea to solely focus on one. Instead, research your audience to find out what will suit them best and use this as a basis for how you target them. Remember, using a healthy mix of different publishing types in your campaigns often works best to get conversions.