How to make money as an affiliate marketer in South Africa

To make money as an affiliate marketer in South Africa, it is important to understand what affiliate marketing is and how South Africa fits into the bigger international picture.

Affiliate marketing is a huge worldwide industry and one of the biggest revenue platforms on the Internet.

Whilst the online advertising category is predominantly dominated by Google, Facebook, and a few other mega online publishing portals, affiliate marketing is the domain of the independent website owner, for the most part.

What both of these sectors have in common is that they advertise a third party’s product and get paid for it.

The difference is the giants make their money from straight advertising spend and affiliates only get paid when a purchase gets made.

Thus affiliate marketers get paid when someone clicks a link or image to an affiliate product they promote and purchases it.

Starting out in affiliate marketing is a real challenge for South Africans

Starting out in affiliate marketing is hard and it can take you years to learn how to do it correctly.

My best suggestion for someone starting out is to join up with an affiliate marketing community that will help you get started by providing the right tools and tuition whilst providing a community of experienced and successful affiliate marketers to lean on and provide mentorship.

Getting back to South African affiliate marketing, we are way behind the rest of the big online commerce countries, like the United States, China, The United Kingdom, Australia, and the rest of Europe.

What most people don’t realise is that Amazon is the world’s biggest affiliate marketing site. Even though the products they deliver to South Africa is limited, you can still cash in on being an affiliate, you just need to promote products to markets they do deliver to. Thus, you would probably be best advised to start a .com site and cater your content for the USA market.

In short, how it works is, if you have a blog, for example, a DIY site and you publish a post on “How to build a treehouse”, you can have actual relevant Amazon products in your sidebar (eg. drills, treehouse plans, prepackaged wood kits, etc) that your site visitors can click on and if they buy the product, you make a commission of around 1 to 4%.

These commissions were slashed dramatically on 21 April 2020. For more information visit Amazon Associates.

Many affiliate websites are review sites where products are evaluated against each other and the reader can click on an affiliate link to the product they prefer. An example would be 12 Best mattresses you can buy in 2020.

Once the reader clicks on an affiliate link and makes a purchase, the website owner receives an affiliate commission.

Making affiliate marketing work in South Africa

There are some advantages and reasons why you may want to be aiming your affiliate based website at the South African market.

If your knowledge and expertise relate mostly to South Africa and you already have a network of followers and product suppliers onboard then staying local makes the most sense.

The South African blogosphere is also much smaller and it is so much easier to stand out as an expert than in the overtraded international market.

The biggest reason for me is that it is that is is much easier to get to feature on the first page of Google search engine results pages (SERP’s) in South Africa. This is vital for free traffic because free traffic is the lifeblood of your affiliate website. It is imperative to have a steady stream of daily website visitors that have found your website from a keyword search term via Google and other search engines.

Build your affiliate website day-by-day and step-by-step.

As a South African affiliate marketer for me, there is no better feeling than waking up in the morning and checking my email to find a message like this in my inbox.

Payouts like this will come from your various articles with affiliate links, you don’t know when and how often they will arrive but as long as you continue to add new content with good affiliate based recommendations, one article can pay you for years to come.

I call this process, future asset creation. Create new assets daily or weekly and the rewards will come.

Here is an example of affiliate payouts for a post I wrote in June 2018 that has so far earned me $609.00 or around R10 150.00 over the last 2 plus years.

Not bad for about 6 hours works and a few updates from time to time.

Start by having a good monetisation plan.

Once you have the idea for the affiliate product based website that you are going to build there is nothing more important than first drawing up your monetisation plan.

Figure out exactly how you are going to make money because if your website does not produce income very soon it is easy to lose interest and commitment.

A monetisation plan will also show you whether it is worth proceeding with your venture or not.

Consider things like:

How much budget do I have for setting up my website and the tools that I will need?

How much budget do I have to promote my website, if any?

What are my realistic chances of success if I do spend this money and how much net profit do I expect to make.

What products or services will you promote?

What is the demand for these products or services?

Are there good affiliate commissions and programs within my website niche, what are they?

How will I build my email list and get loyal followers?

What other revenue streams will I have on my website?

There are many more things to consider so put them all together in your monetisation plan and then plan how you will execute your plan step by step.

What good affiliate marketing programs are there for South Africans?

There are many local and international programs that you can make use of.

South African affiliate marketing platforms to look at are:

Admarulla

affiliate .co.za

OfferForge

Internationally try:

Clickbank

ShareASale

Avangate

Remember affiliate marketing is not an overnight get rich quick business its takes perseverance and lots of trial and error before you will make any real monthly predictable revenues.