Affiliate marketing is no new term. Virtually, all internet users are familiar with the word, ‘Affiliate Marketing’. The terminology first appears and practice on the internet by William J. Tobin in I989. Since then, it has evolved from a form of marketing to a means of making steady income online.
Affiliates marketing is without doubt one of the most legitimate ways to make money online in Nigeria. When you don’t own any products you would want to sell, you promote other people’s product or services to make money online. That’s a bit of what affiliate marketing entails!
According to Statista record on online buyers, an estimate of 2.14 billion people worldwide purchase goods online. In Nigeria, the number of online buyers is at 76.7 million.
With this in mind, you’ll agree that starting affiliate marketing is a lucrative venture. So, how do you start affiliate marketing? Stick with me on this article as I’ll show how to start Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria.
In this article, you’ll learn:
What is affiliate marketing and how it works?
Affiliate marketing simply involves earning an amount of commission for promoting products and services from other companies or merchants. When someone buys a product through your affiliate link, you get a percentage of the sale. It’s a simple, efficient and a cost effective way to make money by advertising for someone else.
Typically, the usual end result is a sale. But some affiliate marketing programs can pay you for sign ups, leads, free-trial users and even clicks to their website.
You don’t have to pay to join most affiliate program. So no cause for alarm on high startup costs. With effective affiliate marketing strategies, you can turn your affiliate marketing business to profitable online business model.
How do affiliate marketing work? Here is how it works:
- You sign up with company A as an affiliate marketer
- The company or their affiliate network provides you with a unique affiliate link or Ad to their Store A.
- You share the unique affiliate link on your website, blog, or social network, podcast etc.
- A customer clicks your unique affiliate link and is redirect to store A
- The customer makes a purchase of product in Store A.
- The affiliate network records the transaction the customer makes.
- And the sale is confirmed by company A
You get paid a commission (monetarily). In other words, you earn a commission each time someone makes a purchase through your unique affiliate link associated with the company’s products or services.
Commission rates for affiliate sales vary depending on the company and the offer. On the low limit, you’ll earn about 3% to 7% of the sale, but with some form of agreement, you can earn as much as 40% – 50%, usually when promoting big deals. There are also affiliate programs that provide a flat rate per sale instead of a percentage.
How profitable is affiliate marketing in Nigeria?
Affiliate marketing in Nigeria is profitable! But, the income generation depends on a lot of things. The better you are at selling or telling your brand story, the more money you can make as an affiliate marketer. There are some affiliate marketers that will make thousands of naira per month and others that make seven figures a year.
Compensation software company Payscale has it that an average annual salary of an affiliate marketer is over $54,404, based on over 7,000 salary profiles, with some affiliate marketers earning significantly more.
Now, let’s do some mathematics to drive home how profitable affiliate marketing is:
Company A sells a smartphone for 100,000 naira each and offers you an affiliate commission of 40% per sale. What this means is, if you can get a customer who makes a purchase of smartphone from Company A store using your unique affiliate link, you get paid 40% of the price of the phone.
Price of the smartphone = ₦100,000
Affiliate commission is 40%
40% of ₦100,000 = ₦40000
Imagine, if you make at least one sale per day, every day for 30 days.
In a month, you earn ₦40000 X 30 = ₦1,200,000 as affiliate commission. I’m sure; you’re convinced that affiliate marketing is a profitable business.
The payment model depends on the action the company wants you to achieve. If you’re promoting a physical product, the action would probably be a purchase. For an affiliate marketer who promotes software, the goal will likely be a free trial signup.
How to Start Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria
Successful as an affiliate marketer takes handwork and discipline. Use the following steps to start your affiliate marketing business in Nigeria:
Pick your niche
The first step is to pick your niche. When it comes to choosing a niche, it is important you go for something you’re passionate about and also have a good knowledge of. This helps you build trust and authenticate every piece of information you pass to your potential customers. It also helps you assess products and brands you intend to promote.
The niche you choose for your affiliate site or platform will determine how much time or SEO effort you’ll put in to see results.
It’s important you know your target audience and why they follow you in the first place. If you know your audience very well, adding a call-to-action to your content is will bring about conversion. As you may like to know, affiliate marketing is a performance-based online business.
Some common affiliate niches you can venture into include:
- Groceries,
- sports,
- technology,
- Fashion etc.
It’s important you pick one or two niches, choosing so many niches makes you “Jack of all trades master of none” By focusing on a particular niche and promoting items from that line of products, you show up more persuading to your prospects.
Join affiliate programs
Next thing is to join affiliate programs. There are so many different affiliates programs in Nigeria you can join. But, it is important you sign up with a high-paying, top-notch and guaranteed affiliate program.
Look! These different Affiliate programs have their terms and conditions of operation. I’ll suggest you review their terms and conditions before joining. Such terms include products type, commission rate, payment threshold, payment date etc. It is important you know that not all affiliate programs with niches for your potential customers provide products in multiple niches.
Some affiliates programs you can join include:
- Expertnaire
- Konga affiliate program
- Amazon affiliate program
- Digistem
- Stakecut
- Clickbank
- 9jabets affiliate program
- Jumia affiliate program
- Piggyvest affiliate program (also a referring program)
Choose your marketing platform
The marketing platform is your sales funnel. Call it your affiliate store, sites or sales platform! Every affiliate marketer may choose a different sales platform. Choose your affiliate marketing platform based on your affiliate marketing ideas.
For example:
If you’re a blogger, Youtuber, or social media influencer your affiliate marketing ideas should be on things like digital content. Create a niche content in that line! You have to ensure the content resonate with your target audience with a call-to-action. The goal is to help your potential customers find the niche products via organic search. This increases the chances that you’ll make sales conversion and earn an affiliate commission.
Again if you’re an educator or teacher, you can integrate affiliate partnership offers into your workshop and earn commission on the process.
No matter the marketing platform you may choose, audience building is the most crucial elements for affiliate marketing. If you cannot connect with the right audience through your marketing platform, chances are you won’t convert them into affiliate sales.
.To pick a marketing platform, ask yourself:
What platform do you engage people most often with? Which platforms do you understand how it works?
Some common platforms affiliate marketers uses are:
- Blogging
- TikTok
- Qoura
One most important thing is to choose a marketing platform you understand very well. Starting with a marketing platform you understands very well helps you create high-quality content. This can result in a stronger, more engaged audience you can convert into sales leads.
Creating your own marketing strategies
Creating your own marketing strategies is an important step you take when starting affiliate marketing. There are so many affiliate marketers like you out there, who promote similar or the same product. So, the competition is high.
A new marketing strategy is the rocket science that’ll launch you into that profitable affiliate marketing business. But developing a new marketing strategy is not so simple, it takes a lot of work — tons of it. And there is no single affiliate marketing strategy that will work perfectly in the entire marketing platform. The best idea is to perfect your new marketing strategy in a marketing platform that aligns with it.
Build your audience
Your audience is your potential customers. It is impossible to make sales leads without audience. Building audience requires an email list, WhatsApp list or general social media followers.
It is possible to have large number of people following you who never read your posts. The key is to make your content resonate with you audience. Once your followers enjoy your content, they’ll share it with their friends and eventually, become paying audience, this is called TARGETING.
There are some many ways to build audience, including:
- SEO techniques – here you apply SEO techniques to make your blog and website content visible on organic search
- Social media marketing – here you engage followers on social media by sharing relevant content
- Email marketing – here you target potential customer through email marketing
- Paid adverts – here you target audience via paid ads campaigns like Google adwords.
Read: How to Build Online Presence for your Local Business
Promote relevant product or services
To make money as an affiliate marketer, your audience needs to connect with your product. The products or items you promote needs to be product or service they want. Getting this wrong at this point can hinder your success and diminishes your trustworthiness as an affiliate marketer
People tend to buy what they love and that is why you need to choose the right product to promote. If you’re not sure of where to look for products or brands to work with, don’t worry.
There are tons of affiliate marketplaces you can check out, including:
Jumia
Konga
Amazon
Digistem
Clickbank
cj
affiliates.skrill
Another option is to go to the websites of the product and services you normally use and check if they offer affiliate program for the product. Most large companies like Amazon often have affiliate program they promote on their site.
On the other hand, you can also take a more direct approach. Reach out to the owners of hot selling product you come across and see if they offer an affiliate marketing program. If they don’t, they might be happy to set up deals with you, such as offering you a special coupon code to share with your followers.
The best deals often are found when you’re the first to obtain relevant distribution rights, such as approaching the seller of a new product and signing up an agreement as their wholesaler.
It is important you read the terms of service of every Affiliate marketing programs you decide to join. For example, some affiliate links have a cookie with a specified timeframe, and some programs don’t allow purchase pay-per-click ads using their product or company’s name.
Also make sure the product or service you’re promoting is the best fit for the platform you’re promoting it on. For example, sport wears are well suited to image-heavy platforms like Instagram. But, if you’re promoting a digital product, like software, your conversion rates may be higher on longer-form platforms, like a blog or sales page.
Tips for your Affiliate Marketing Success
Here are some tips that will help you succeed in your affiliate marketing business
Get personal in your review
One way to achieve success in affiliate marketing is by getting personal. In your review of product or services, it’s best to get personal. A good personal review makes people relax with you.
Share your personal experience in your blog, social media post, Instagram , or YouTube video. If you writing a personal review, try as much as possible to give a valid opinion based on your experience and knowledge of the product. People will be comfortable following you and acting on your words if they can trust you
So trust is what makes a difference in affiliate marketing. The level of trust you’ll need to make affiliate sales depends on your industry and the products or services you’re recommending.
Another way to build trust as an affiliate market is by promoting those products you use or by sticking to your area of expertise.
Create a relevant content
Another way to achieve success as affiliate marketer is to drive traffic to you promotional site by creating relevant tutorial.
People often search “how to” on Google searches, such as “how to make up” or “how to dress gorgeously.” If you provide a tutorial that solves a searcher’s problem and clearly showcase the value of a product, your referrals or call-to-action will make more sense in context. In other words, you’ll be providing the customer with a stronger incentive to buy the product you’re recommending.
Build an email list
An email list is contacts of people who have subscribe to receive information from you. It’s important to keep this list intact because it is the best ways to connect with people outside of social media.
Email marketing has proven to have the highest conversion rate (65%) compared to social and other marketing channels. So gather emails from your content and send a relevant blog post ones or twice weekly to you subscribers.
As an Affiliate marketer, you can send things like:
Free ebooks
New blog posts
Discount deals
Entertaining stories etc. to subscribers on your list:
It is important to use your email list to show value to your subscribers. Never send an offensive email to them otherwise; they will opt out from receiving email from you. Once in a while, promote your affiliate product to them.
Find searchable term
Depending on the product you promoting, you can find searchable term or keywords and write blog post on it. Keyword tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner, Wordstream etc, will be of great help when searching for searchable terms. Searchable term allows you create valuable content that will help drive traffic to your affiliate sales platform.
Master your marketing strategy
If you want success in affiliate marketing, you need to have and master one or two affiliate marketing strategy. For example, if you choose your sales channel or affiliate marketing platform as social medial; you need to be a good social media influencer who commands followers.
When you choose a marketing platform like blog, you need to be at good creating valuable content that resonate with your audience.
Top affiliates program in Nigeria
Here are my top recommendations of affiliate programs:
- Jumia Affiliates Program
Jumia is Africa’s Amazon. It’s the largest e-commerce company in Africa with a robust affiliates program.
How to join Jumia Affiliates and start promoting product:
- Visit Jumia website and sign up as affiliate
- Login to your affiliates tab
- Choose the product you want market
- Get the banner or link from them
- Use your marketing strategy to generate sales.
All sales will be recorded and you’ll be paid on 30th of every month once you meet the minimum withdrawal threshold of ₦10,000.
2: Expertnaire Affiliates Program:
Expertnaire is by far the best affiliates program in Nigeria. They offer products that cut across health, lifestyle, technology etc for affiliate’s marketers.
How to join Expertnaire and start promoting products
- Register an account from expertnaire.com
- Login to your dashboard
- Navigate and choose any product you want.
- Generate sales.
A commission differs on each product and you get paid every Friday with a threshold of ₦5000.
3: Bet9ja Affiliates Program:
Bet9ja is the biggest betting company in Africa. Bet9ja’s biggest campaign is their 100% Welcome Bonus of up to ₦100,000 – the largest offering of its kind in Nigeria for new customers who register and make their first successful deposit.
Their affiliates program is very lucrative as you get %20 of any amount your affiliates win or lose. Sign up on their website as affiliates and grab the promotional materials.
4: Amazon Affiliates Program:
There’s hardly anyone on the internet who doesn’t know Amazon. They are the largest e-commerce company in the world and one of the most valuable companies in the world. With millions of products available, you stand to market any type of product you want.
- Sign up on their site
- Choose any product
- Grab the promotional materials and voila!
5: Bluehost Affiliates Program:
Bluehost is one of the biggest web hosting platforms in the world. They pay for any domain or web host service you generate a sale for.
FAQs about Affiliates Marketing
Is affiliate marketing profitable in Nigeria?
Yes. Asides from having a very low startup cost, affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative online business for Nigerians.
Can I do affiliate marketing without a website?
Having a website is not a prerequisite. You can simply use your social media channels like Youtube and Instagram or email list to promote your affiliate products. You can also build an audience on WhatsApp.
How much can I make from affiliates marketing?
How much you can make depends on your efforts. But there’s no limit. More conversions, more commissions.
Affiliates marketing business requires dedication and hard-work. Your success in it depends on your strategies and executions. There, you have it, feel free to try out any of the affiliate programs we have suggested.