3 Types of Affiliate Marketing That YOU Need To Know About…

3 Like Minded People Discussing Work Related Info

After learning about affiliate marketing, you might start asking yourself, “How many types of affiliate marketing are there?”

The answer to this question is that there are several.

In this post, you’ll learn about the 3 main types of affiliate that every aspiring affiliate marketer should know about.

Although, affiliate marketing isn’t a mystery, sometimes you never know when an affiliate is unattached, involved, or related to the products or services.

Not that it really matters; because typically a customer will make a purchase regardless of what method you decide to use.

However, if you’re thinking about taking up affiliate marketing as a future career, you’ll need to learn what type of affiliate marketing is right for you and your goals. 

When we’re trying to differentiate affiliate marketing predates and relationships and marketing types, there are several points of view that you must understand:

Let’s say you are thinking about becoming an affiliate marketer and you’re trying to decide how you’re going to promote products on an related affiliate marketer site.

Below I’ll explain the 3 most common methods briefly.

Man Holding Up 3 Fingers

To understand the three main types of affiliate marketing, you need to decide if you want to be attached to the offer or not. 

As you can continue reading, you’ll understand more on this topic.

  • First, an affiliate can promote ANY product or services that aren’t related to their affiliate site. Instead they use basic PPC.
  • Affiliates can also promote products or services that are related to their review sites and the affiliate isn’t required to personally use it.
  • Or an affiliate can be attached to the product or service and truly believe in it because they actually use the product and have received results. 

The three main types that affiliates use for their website marketing efforts can be seen below.

Unattached Affiliate Marketing

An unattached affiliate marketing program is almost as simple as it sounds.

Using this affiliate marketing method, the affiliate has no attachment to the niche, product, service, or audience.

In fact, your audience doesn’t know who you are, and you don’t know what the product truly offers.

This type of marketing allows the affiliate to be behind the scenes because they don’t have to build a target audience, a reputation, spend a lot of time creating quality content, or gain trust. 

So, instead of having to put in a ton of legwork, they take one of the fastest routes, which is grabbing any affiliate link and using pay-per-click advertising.

The benefit of this model is that you can generate an income without being attached to any specific industry.

The primary goal is to get in and get out because this model allows you to generate passive income, a lot faster if you know what you’re doing.

Moreover, this method works well, especially if you can find the right buyer keywords and have marketing capital.

Having enough capital available helps you test and experiment with your advertising campaigns; this method could help you make money online a little easier, and a lot faster than taking the longer route. 

However, there are drawbacks. If you do not have a budget, this can become a financial problem.  

Lady Showing Empty Red Wallet

Unattached affiliate marketing is considered pay-per-click marketing.

This is when you, as the affiliate, have no influence, and they are not an authority in the field of the product or services that they are promoting. 

Half the time, the affiliate doesn’t even have any real feelings towards the product or the audience because there’s no relationship between you and the final buyer.  

For instance, a jewelry blogger might recommend jewelry cleaner on their affiliate blog as a solution.

And on the other hand, they could be promoting adult offers through paid advertising.

The blog is where the affiliate puts in a lot of legwork and tries to build up trust with their audience, but with the paid advertising, it’s less personal. 

In order to make unattached marketing work, all you have to do is find a product that you want to promote.

You also might want to consider creating a landing page, for which you can use Google Sites or System.io for free.

Of course, they both have limitations, but they will help you move forward. 

Once you have your landing page setup, you’ll need to find traffic sources. Most affiliates use paid ones, which are Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Microsoft Ads, Solo Ads, or Pop Ads.

The only goal of an unattached affiliate now is to get visitors to click their affiliate link and make a purchase using their link.

If the visitor makes a purchase, a commission is earned.

In addition to that, this type of affiliate marketing has benefits and drawbacks as well.

The strong point is that if you have no presence or authority, the scaling process is much easier, plus the work load is less and you can earn money faster. 

On the other hand, there is a drawback to this: in order to do this type of marketing, you’ll need to use paid traffic sources, and it can cost you a fortune if you take careless actions.

So, essentially, it causes you to lose money but, if you get good at this method, you can also scale faster.. 

I have tried this type of affiliate marketing, and it does work very nicely, but there’s a learning curve to it that requires you to have a decent budget, learn, and test.

Just the other day, I put an offer up, (unattached) testing out this method, and my final bill in less than 24 hours cost me $191 for 181 clicks, 2 referrals, with zero conversions. 

Lady and Man Sitting In Front Of Computer Shocked

So, I’m no good at paid per click advertising. This is a skill that takes time and patience to learn.

If you were able to master this skill, more power to you, and I wish you continued success.

Please don’t forget to come back and teach the rest of us.

On the other hand, if you don’t have the budget to throw money away, please try the other methods. 

Pros

  • It’s easy to sign up to multiple affiliate programs and grab an affiliate link.
  • Affiliate income can scale with the right marketing campaigns.
  • You can see results faster than waiting on the search engine and web traffic.

Cons

  • The wrong keywords can bring in less qualified leads.
  • Paid Traffic can way more than what it would take for you to generate leads from a website traffic.
  • You may make little or no money until you learn how to capitalize.

Related marketing is when you have an affiliate website that promotes related products or services within your particular niche.

For instance, if you’re a home cinema blogger and you talk about receivers, subwoofers, TVs, or projectors, everything I just mentioned is related to a home theater.

This is where the related part comes in. As an affiliate, there’s no way you can test out every single TV, projector, subwoofer, or receiver that you promote on your blog.

Therefore, we call this related marketing because the products and services are related to your niche.  

This type of affiliate marketing can be very effective because it’s a way to generate traffic and sales for your website.

Additionally, it’s where you will have a presence online, you audience will see you.  Whether it’s through a blog, podcast, social media, or YouTube. 

How this works is, the affiliate places affiliate links to related products or services in their niche. Keep in mind the affiliate doesn’t always make use of every single product, goods or services.

In most cases, the affiliate has a connection with the offer through their source of traffic, such as a blog, podcast, YouTube, or social media. This is why it’s called “related affiliate marketing.” 

For instance, with related affiliate marketing, as an affiliate, you can use Google AdSense, Ezoic, or other related affiliate programs.

Placing related affiliate program links on your blog does help you earn extra income; therefore, it’s a great strategy to use.

Woman holding 1 Thousand Dollars

The only drawback to this method is that it’s a challenge to scale and not as easy as it sounds.

Since the affiliate isn’t testing every product, there’s no way you can provide in-depth details and an authentic review or recommendation.

Essentially, you’re only hoping that the product works well and doesn’t cause your audience any issues or lose trust. 

But no worries, with affiliate marketing, it happens. There have been times in the blogsphere where well-known companies had products that caused some issues for affiliates and their audience.

So, it’s not until later that you, as an affiliate, discover that the product you’re promoting either doesn’t work, has issues, or is not trustworthy. 

In either case, it’s not a requirement for related affiliate marketers to use the product or services that they’re promoting.

In fact, the majority of affiliate marketers and courses teach this method.

Almost all beginners start with this method because it works, and saves money. From my experience, all the affiliate marketing courses I’ve taken teach this exact same method.

Therefore, it’s not a crime to use this method because, ultimately, your goal as an affiliate marketer is to drive sales and earn commissions. 

If you want to use this method without using the product yourself, you’ll need to do research and gather accurate information about the services or products that you plan to promote.

The information that you gather can help persuade your audience to purchase the product. 

Pros

  • You can promote any affiliate offer related to your niche.
  • It’s a great way start affiliate marketing, and learn to generate passive income.
  • Many review sites use this method and its an effective affiliate marketing strategy.

Cons

  • Affiliate marketing takes time to learn.
  • You could risk promoting and recommending the wrong affiliate product, especially if you have never used the product before.
  • If you recommend too many different products, not all affiliates make actual sales.

Involved Affiliate Marketing

Using the product can give you a better understanding of what it can do and what it can’t do. You’ll understand the benefits, features, and drawbacks of the products or services that you’re promoting.

This can help you, as an affiliate, create more effective content; this is called involved marketing. 

Man Holding A Helpful Tips Sign

Involved marketing is where you, as the affiliate, have used the product or services that you promote. Not only have you used the product, but you truly believe in it and would personally recommend it to others, including your audience.

In fact, involved affiliate marketing is the complete opposite of unattached marketing (a.k.a. unrelated affiliate marketing).

Because the customer sees you while making recommendations, you have a level of responsibility that upholds you while unrelated affiliate marketers do not. 

Furthermore, this type of marketing is not where you use your money to make money, such as through a paid traffic source like pay per click (PPC), solo ads, or pay per view (PPV).

It’s putting you in front of the offer.

As a result, your reputation, trust, and authority are what will get others to take your recommendations, use the product or services that you are recommending, and pay you as the affiliate. 

Regardless of whether you choose to go with the unattached, related, or involved marketing route, the most important takeaway is to promote products or services that are related to your niche or industry and believe that they’ll be valuable as well as helpful for your audience. 


Pros

  • You’re confident in what you’re recommending because, you’ve used the product yourself.
  • Your affiliate sales can increase because, you’re building creditability with an audience.
  • Your audience tends to trust you more.

Cons

  • This method can take a lot of time before you can earn affiliate income.
  • You won’t be able to go and grab just any affiliate link, because, you’re only recommending products that you use and trust.
  • It will require a ton of patience.
 Types of Affiliate Marketing

Final Thoughts

In conclusion what’s best for you unattached, related, or involved affiliate marketing, it all depends on you and your goals.

You’ll need to decide if you want to spend money on traffic sources, if you don’t then you only have two options left.

With both methods that are left, related and involved both options are great. I’ve used both related and involved affiliate marketing methods. I’ve also combined both.

As I mentioned earlier almost all affiliate marketing courses teach the related marketing, this is why you see a ton of review sites out there with products on the website owner has never really used the product.

And that’s okay its not a requirement.

In fact, related marketing is a great way to learn how affiliate marketing works.

Therefore, if you’re a beginner with no experience at all I would recommend you start with related marketing until you gain the experience.

Then you can decide what affiliate marketing method is best for you.

Lakisha Akbar

Lakisha Akbar

Hello, My name is Lakisha Akbar passion for writing. I'm on a mission to help people like you to "not just hang in there" but, to "get up and thrive". I Love learning SEO and Affiliate Marketing. I like to talk about Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Programs, and Affiliate Course Reviews.

2 thoughts on “3 Types of Affiliate Marketing That YOU Need To Know About…”

  1. I’ve been absent for a while, but now I remember why I used to love this blog. Thank you, I?¦ll try and check back more frequently. How frequently you update your website?

    Reply
    • Thank you, and welcome back! I typically update throughout the week. However, I’ve been updating the blog so, recently I have not posted. I’ll be posting again soon. Thanks for stopping by!

      Reply

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