Affiliate marketing is a great way to monetize your audience or content in South Africa. There are many different ways to make money with affiliate marketing. In this guide we will explore the best methods to make money with affiliate marketing in South Africa with a focus on South African affiliate networks and programs.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing can be defined as an advertising model in which a company sets up a program through which they compensate third-parties to generate clicks, sales, or leads to the companies’ products and services.
For example, a vehicle company launching a new car model perhaps wants to get people to book a test drive, and are willing to pay X amount for each person that you refer and that successfully makes a booking.
How much can you make with affiliate marketing?
Several factors determine how much money you can make with affiliate marketing. among these factor are:
Reach: How large is your audience and how many people are you able to promote affiliate offers to?
If you have an email newsletter with 1000 subscribers for example, you’d be able to reach a lot more people than someone with an email list of only 100 people. Let us say that you both promote the same offer and both of you achieve a conversion rate of 3%, resulting in R50 per lead – then if you have 1000 email subscribers you’d earn R1500 versus someone with 100 subscribers who would earn R150.
However if the person with 100 subscribers was promoting an offer with a commission of R1000 per lead, then with the same conversion rate of 3% they will earn R3000.
So audience size, and offer selection are the two biggest contributors to how much you can earn with affiliate marketing in South Africa. All in all, the sky’s the limit and million dollar brands like The Wire Cutter have been built with affiliate marketing as their primary source of revenue.
How much do affiliate marketers earn in South Africa?
Affiliate marketers in South Africa earn anywhere from a 1% to 45% per sale, or up to R1000 per lead with some affiliate programs. Aside from one-time commissions, some affiliate programs – especially those with memberships – pay recurring commissions, meaning that you refer someone once, and can continue to earn into the future.
Step-by-step guide to making money with affiliate marketing in South Africa
Steps to making money with affiliate marketing in South Africa:
- Choose Your Marketing Channel
- Join Relevant Affiliate Programs
- Promote Selected Offers
- Monitor and Optimize Performance
Step 1: Choose Your Marketing Channel
Where do you plan on promoting affiliate offers? do you have a blog where you can add links into your content or place banner advertisements? Or do you have a highly engaged social media following which you could leverage? Email newsletters and lists are also a great medium to promote affiliate offers.
Blogs and websites: Combining affiliate marketing with your site can do wonders, For example you could write reviews on products like our review of Nimbus Note and place an affiliate link within the article which when someone clicks on the link and proceeds to purchase the product you could earn a commission.
Next, most affiliate networks and programs offer banner advertisements, also referred to as display advertisements, which can be placed anywhere on your site and does the same as an affiliate link – however it’s more attention grabbing which increases the likelihood of someone seeing the ad and clicking on it.
Social Media: If you have a highly engaged audience on social media you can work affiliate banners into the content you post and share affiliate links easily. For example adding an affiliate link to your Instagram bio.
Affiliate marketing can be a great source of income if you have a YouTube channel. Mention products in your videos and add affiliate links to where viewers can buy the products in your video descriptions.
Email: Do you have an email list to which you regularly send out email campaigns to? It could be a newsletter about anything. With email you can add affiliate links and affiliate banner advertisements. Some affiliate networks like OfferForge and Affiliate.co.za provides email templates with your affiliate link already included which you can send out to your subscribers too, saving you time from creating an email from scratch.
Be sure that you have permission from your email subscribers that they have opted in to receive marketing or third party promotional information.
Step 2: Join Relevant Affiliate Programs
Once you’ve decided which through which digital medium you will be promoting affiliate offers, the next step is to sign up to relevant affiliate programs and networks.
List our niche, for example, “Finance”, then search for Finance affiliate programs on Google. You should find many affiliate programs to choose from.
If you plan on running multiple offers, joining an affiliate network will allow you to promote several different affiliate programs all within one platform, which saves you time and helps you stay organized when it comes to seeing the performance of your campaigns and receiving payouts on time.
To save you time, we’ve compiled the complete list of All Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Networks In South Africa.
Step 3: Promote Selected Offers
After joining an affiliate program or network, read up about how their program works and do some research on the products and services themselves so that you know what you are promoting and and how best to promote it, as well as what the program allows and does not allow. For example, many affiliate programs do not allow affiliates to run paid advertisements promoting their offers.
Now you can go ahead and start promoting your selected affiliate offers and monitor performance of your affiliate marketing efforts.
Step 4: Monitor and Optimize Performance
Finally, most affiliate programs and almost all affiliate networks provide intuitive performance reporting dashboards where you can see metrics on the performance of the offers you are promoting. Look into the results you achieve and continually test and optimize in order to get the best results and ultimately grow your revenue.
