In the Internet marketing world, digital marketing is a general concept and has multiple sub-sections, this means affiliate marketing falls under digital marketing.
Affiliate marketing is part or is a branch of digital marketing and both work towards the same goal or purpose.
However, there are a few differences between them in terms of operation.
Affiliate marketing allows you to earn money by promoting other people’s products or services for a commission, whereas digital marketing is the marketing of products using online digital mediums such as social media, emails, websites, or blogs.
Table of Contents
Is Affiliate Marketing Digital Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is part of digital marketing, it is a subset of digital marketing but there are a few differences between both, generally, the two parties play a huge role in online marketing and work toward the same goal.
- Digital marketing is a broad term used for marketing in the technology world, mainly on the Internet.
- Affiliate marketing is simply a method of putting a product or service in front of targeted prospects using a digital medium.
But generally, it’s digital marketing that plays a larger role, it’s the core component of all marketing strategies.
Affiliate Marketing And Digital Marketing: Core Differences
| No: | AFFILIATE MARKETING | DIGITAL MARKETING |
| 1 | In Affiliate marketing, you earn a commission when you promote a company product or service. |
Digital marketing is promoting any product or service on the internet through either written content or video content, etc. |
| 2 | Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing that falls under digital marketing, the more customers you refer to buy a product, the more money you earn. |
Digital marketing offers many different advertising platforms to market products online. |
| 3 | In Affiliate marketing, you cannot track your affiliate links campaign unless you use tracking tools. |
In digital marketing, you can track your marketing campaign’s progress and you can determine which links work best and which ones is not working for future strategy. |
| 4 | Affiliate marketing relies solely on digital platforms to generate sales. |
Digital marketing brings so many factors to its own platforms. |
| 5 | Affiliate marketing is a business model and can make you rich when done correctly. | Digital marketing is a marketing platform, not a business model. |
The Similarity Between Both Marketing Strategy
Wondering what’s the similarity between affiliate marketing and digital marketing?
Affiliate marketing and digital marketing, both work together toward the same goal.
Both affiliate and digital marketing help promote products and services.
With the right strategy and approach, both can be used for business advantage by targeting and reaching a larger audience and selling a product or service much faster and easier.
Understanding Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing simply means selling or promoting someone else (either a company or an individual) product or service for a commission.
You find a product or service you like, you sign up with the product as an affiliate.
Then, you promote it to others, when they buy from you, you get paid a percentage of the sale of the product.
The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you’re not actually producing the product or the service by yourself.
Instead, you’re helping a company or another person to get their product or service in front of the right audience or customer.
With your right or effective marketing skills, they pay you for every successful referral you generate for them
You can benefit from affiliate marketing like:
- You don’t have to worry about customer service.
- Shipping of the product.
- Refund.
- Customer service, etc.
All that is taken care of for you by the product creator, your job is to just market the product.
- PS: I have another post where I go more into detail on what affiliate marketing is and how it works. Check it out.
Why Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is one of the most lucrative ways of making money online.
There are so many benefits you can derive from affiliate marketing – it’s easy to set up and you can start making money relatively quickly if things are done right, etc.
That said…
Below Are A Few Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing:
- You Can Make Money From Different Affiliate Products And Services: Affiliate marketing is a general concept, it’s open to everyone and you can join and promote any product of your choice.
- Affiliate Marketing Is Cost-Effective: One of the amazing things about affiliate marketing is that you can earn a healthy income from it without having to spend a ton of money on advertisement, etc if you do things correctly.
- It Location Independent: Affiliate marketing allows you to work from anywhere you like. You don’t have to be in one specific place or location to do affiliate marketing.
- Affiliate Marketing is Highly Scalable: If you put more time, effort, and dedication into affiliate marketing, you can easily increase your income significantly through affiliate marketing.
- No Initial Investment: You don’t have to invest anything up front to start affiliate marketing, in fact, most affiliate programs are free to join. The only investment is if you choose to invest in traffic but that’s totally optional.
How To Earn Money From Affiliate Marketing?
To earn money from affiliate marketing, below, I lay out the steps you need to take to participate in an affiliate marketing program.
- Step #1. Decide On A Niche: A niche is simply a topic you’re interested in or an industry you want to build your business around.
- Step #2. Choose Which Affiliate Product To Promote: There are tons of affiliate offers out there, research and pick one that’s in high demand and relevant to your niche and obtain your affiliate link.
- Step #3. Pick A Platform To Promote Your Offer: You can create a blog or use social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, etc to promote your affiliate offer. But I’d recommend you build a blog. It’s the best way of promoting affiliate offers. If you don’t have a blog yet, you can start your blog here.
- Step #4. Create Content: Start producing compelling content on your blog and share your affiliate link within your content.
- Step #5. Collect Your Commission: Collect your commission anytime someone purchases anything through your link. Depending on the program you partnered with and the type of offer you’re promoting, the commission rate may differ. You’ll get around 15% to 75% which is common when you’re promoting digital products.
- PS: I have another post where I go more in-depth on how to start and make money from affiliate marketing the right way.
Affiliate Marketing Payment Path
Affiliate marketing comes with different payment models. Below are the three existing payment paths in affiliate marketing.
- Pay-Per-Sale (PPS): In this system, you only get paid when any visitor or a customer purchases any product or service.
- Pay Per Lead (PPL): Here, you (the affiliate) get paid when you refer a customer to a merchant’s website and they submit their email address by joining the merchant’s email list or download anything on the site by using their email, etc.
- Pay Per Click (PPC): Here, you get paid if any visitor or customer clicks on your link or banner but he or she does not purchase anything.
- PS: You can read more here on how affiliates get paid and who pays them.
Also, read!
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the use of online media such as websites, email, and social media to connect with clients or customers and promote or advertise products or services to them.
In other words.
Digital marketing is the use of the internet to introduce your product or service to your ideal customers, users, or targeted audiences.
The key component of digital marketing is to advertise brands and boost sales through digital marketing mediums.
Digital marketing is a well-known marketing platform that is used by most top earners because it’s a less marketing strategy than the traditional marketing movement.
If you’re an online entrepreneur or business owner, you can use a digital platform to build brand awareness so that people can see you as a reliable source with great service.
You can also use it to build trust and relationships with existing customers and increase your affiliate earnings.
Digital Marketing Channels
In this section, let’s take a look at some of the digital marketing channels that are important for all types of businesses.
- Affiliate Marketing.
- Content Marketing.
- Social Media Marketing.
- Email Marketing.
- Search Engine Optimization.
- Influencer Marketing.
- Paid Marketing.
- Pay-Per-Click Marketing.
- Video Marketing on YouTube.
- Retargeting Marketing.
- Referral Marketing, etc.
Some Job profiles in Digital Marketing
Let’s take a look at some of the best jobs in the digital marketing world.
- Online Marketing Trainer
- Internet Marketing Manager
- Website Content Writer (Freelancer)
- SEO Executive
- Online Entrepreneur
- Social Media Executive
- Digital Agency
- Email Marketing Executive
- SEO Analyst
- Inbound Marketing Manager
- Web Designer & Web Analytic Expert
- CRM Manager
- Graphic Design And Videography
- Crypto Trading
- E-Commerce Manager, etc
The above-mentioned are high-paying digital skills currently. These skills are in high demand and pay $1k-$10k monthly.
What Is The Best Course To Learn Digital Marketing?
There are a variety of courses out there on digital marketing. One of the best rights now is “The Complete Digital Marketing Course” on Udemy.
The complete digital marketing course is designed for both beginners and advanced marketers who want to learn the basic foundation of digital marketing.
And master the necessary skills and tools needed to grow and scale your business.
During the course, you’ll master the following digital marketing skills such as:
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Copywriting
- Search engine optimization, etc
Also, after going through the course, you’ll gain knowledge regarding some marketing principles such as,
- How businesses function
- How do businesses market their product or services across all the major digital channels, etc.
You’ll gain access to some key features of the course. Key features such as
- 20+ Hours of training
- On-demand video
- Lifetime access to the course
- Free downloadable resources
- Q&A forum
- Certificate after completing the course, etc
To get more information about the course hover over to udemy.com and search for ‘the complete digital marketing course’.
What Does Digital Marketing Course Consist Of?
Digital marketing consists of tools, techniques, processes, etc that are used to increase or grow business or organization profit, income, goals, or anything that’s related to digital marketing.
Here are some types of digital marketing:
- Content marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing
- Display Marketing
- Social media marketing, etc
All these different fields are part of digital marketing.
Digital Marketing Course Syllabus
Learning digital marketing nowadays is almost comparable to a model classroom lesson or education experience.
Let’s look at some course syllabi in digital marketing:
- Introduction To Digital Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Local SEO
- Keyword Research
- Email Marketing
- Content Writing
- Content Marketing
- YouTube Marketing
- Website Creation
- Lead Generation For Businesses
- Video Optimization
- Google Webmaster
- Google Adsense
- Graphic Designing/ Creative Designing, etc
Who Can Do Digital Marketing?
Businesses that want to remain one step ahead of their competitors or want to meet as many customers as possible and increase their profits can leverage digital marketing.
Also!
Students, entrepreneurs, working professionals, startups, marketing professionals, etc can also use digital marketing to grow or develop their knowledge and strategies.
How Important Is Affiliate Marketing in Digital Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an essential component in digital marketing, it’s one of the best digital marketing solutions for growing an online business and increasing sales.
It’s an easy way to earn extra or even a full-time income online and it doesn’t require any startup fees or technical skills.
Digital marketing channels offer a flexible approach as well as a cost-effective method to promote your affiliate product and services or brand.
And attract genuine leads and customers interested in your offer.
With the help of digital channels, you’ll be able to drive a massive amount of traffic to your affiliate website or blog that’ll help to grow, boost, or increase your brand awareness and incredibility.
Furthermore.
Affiliate marketing allows companies to expose their product or service to a large number of people in the online world and grow their customer base.
This way, they’re able to acquire ideal customers who did not even know about their brand or company.
So, that’s how important is affiliate marketing in digital marketing
Why Digital Marketing For Businesses
Wondering what is the importance of digital marketing?
- Digital marketing helps provide high-quality leads for businesses in a cost-effective way.
- It is good for businesses that want to spend less money on online marketing instead of traditional marketing such as advertising in newspapers, TV advertisements, etc which are too costly.
- It helps reach targeted audiences with increasingly conversion-oriented messages across multiple channels.
- It provides a higher return on investment.
- It is easy to target specific audiences.
- It provides free traffic to businesses.
- With digital marketing, no physical appearance is needed for the business.
- You can build or begin your own business using digital channels.
- Digital marketing has greater engagement as compared to traditional marketing movements.
- With digital marketing, you can start at your own pace without offering help from anyone.
- It has a global reach. Anyone around the world can get exposed to your business.
- It helps improve your conversion rate. If you target specific prospects who are more likely to be interested in your business, you can increase your chances of increasing your conversion rate and earnings.
- Digital marketing is easy to manage and you get more authentic measuring of data than traditional marketing networks.
Above are the advantages of digital marketing for businesses.
How Digital Marketing Can Be Effective In Affiliate Marketing
Let’s discuss how digital marketing can be effective for affiliate marketers:
- Save Time – As an affiliate marketer, leveraging digital marketing to promote your offer, you’ll see results faster than traditional methods (you’ll see an increase in traffic on your website and lead generation).
- Multiple Marketing Option – Digital marketing offers various types of methods to promote your offer, if you’re not getting results on time, you can change the method of marketing online.
- Cost Effective – Digital marketing is one of the cost-effective marketing strategies. It’s free to market on most digital platforms.
- Brand Awareness – Digital marketing helps affiliate marketers create brand value or awareness among their ideal customers on social media platforms.
What Is The Best Affiliate Marketing Strategy For Digital Marketing?
The best affiliate marketing strategy is to create your own blog or website, which is not hard nowadays to do.
Then, you want to build trust and relationships with your intended audience by producing CONTENT that provides value or a solution to their problem.
I mean content that helps solve a specific problem or pain point your audience is having challenges with.
As they got to know you and you have established some degree of TRUST with them with your content
You can start to promote your affiliate offers to them.
When people trust you and your content, they’ll be more likely to buy from you.
What Are Some Of The Best Digital Marketing Strategies?
Let’s look at some of the best digital marketing strategies:
1. Having An Effective Communication Strategy
In digital marketing, having an effective communication marketing strategy is one of the best and long-term strategies for a profitable business.
Effective communication between you and your ideal customers can dramatically create various income opportunities.
2. Effective Email Marketing Strategy
Despite the effectiveness of paid advertising, SEO, etc, email marketing channels stand out as one of the best and most effective marketing channels.
Email marketing is one of the most lucrative and cost-effective marketing channels for consistent earnings in no time…
For every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an ROI of $40.
That said…
To run email marketing effectively requires proper knowledge and skills.
And your effectiveness in email marketing mainly depends on your email marketing platform.
So, you need email marketing experience and the right email service to be able to run effective email marketing.
Why?
Well, the thing is, not all email service platforms come with proper email marketing tools.
Some lack a lot of functionality and some are complicated to use.
That said, if you want to dive deeper into the best email platform, I recommend GetResponse.
GetResponse comes with all the necessary tools you need to run a successful email marketing campaign and their platform is user-friendly meaning it’s easy to use.
Which Is Better For Beginners – Affiliate Marketing Or Digital Marketing Business
Both affiliate marketing and digital marketing have massive potential.
That said…
If you want to start an online business without any initial investment and experience.
And also, if you’re good at sales then affiliate marketing must be your best bet.
But if you don’t like selling, then you should probably start a digital marketing business.
If you have good knowledge about a specific subject or topic – you can create your own product or service and allow other marketers to promote it for you for a commission.
But do remember, starting a digital marketing business, requires a little bit of upfront investment and skills.
And it consumes a lot of time and effort on your end, you have to deal with so many things to keep your product up and running.
However, both are good ways but in my opinion, I think affiliate marketing is better than digital marketing business.
What Makes More Money? Affiliate Marketing Or Digital Marketing
Wondering affiliate marketing and digital marketing which one makes more money?
Making money with affiliate marketing and digital products both are long-term strategies.
You would make more money in affiliate marketing and digital marketing provided you’re willing to put in the necessary work and time.
Bloggers and YouTubers mostly use affiliate marketing. These people are making a decent income in this field.
But to make a decent income from affiliate marketing you need to promote high-ticket affiliate programs (programs that pay high commissions).
Other than that, it will take you a very long time to make a significant income from it.
But one thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t control the commission model (how much you should be paid).
Whereas with digital marketing, you’re in control of your income.
I mean, if you create your own product or services, you get 100% of the money – you don’t share the commission with anyone.
Also, you control the pricing and this can put you in a position to accumulate more income in no time.
That said…
You can earn how much you want in both affiliate marketing and digital marketing but depending on which you’re better at.
Which One Is Easy To Make Money With? Affiliate Marketing Or Digital Marketing
Well, let me be real and honest with you, making money online either from affiliate marketing or digital marketing is not as easy as you may think.
It’s difficult, it’s time-consuming and it requires a lot of knowledge and experience.
If you want to make money from both strategies – you have to follow a specific plan and strategies and be willing to do the work.
The truth is, you need to FOCUS on providing real value to your end user instead of trying to make money from them.
Produce the best possible content that helps your ideal customers before recommending your product or service to them.
Don’t go straight for the sale, instead, provide useful content relevant to your niche and product.
Why?
Going straight for the sale, it will be very hard and difficult for you to make your business profitable.
Money follows values and more value = more money.
How Can I Start A Digital Marketing Business With Affiliate Marketing?
Here Are Some Key Steps To Follow To Start A Digital Marketing Business With Affiliate Marketing:
- The first and best thing you need to start your own digital agency or business is to get a mentor or coach (if you’re new in digital marketing) so you can learn or know all the necessary steps before getting started in the digital marketing world.
- After that, you want to choose a niche that you’re interested in and knowledgeable about.
- Now, after your niche is ready, you want to pick a product (either your own product or someone else’s product) that you can promote.
- Create your own blog/website. Creating a blog or website nowadays is not that complicated, there are a ton of platforms available on the internet that you can use to create good-looking and professional websites. You can check out this tutorial on how to create a blog/website.
- After your blog or website is up and running, you want to create a personal brand. How to build a personal brand? You create a brand simply by providing useful content for your audience. Content that helps solve a specific problem they’re facing or having challenges with.
- Build a landing page to capture your visitors or customers’ email addresses before sending them to your product sales page. This way, when they don’t purchase the product the first time, now, you have the ability to remarket that same product to them over and over again in the future through email marketing.
- Start driving traffic to your website. There are literally hundreds or even thousands of ways in which you can get or drive targeted traffic to your website. You can get traffic to your website using free traffic channels such as social media platforms or paid advertising models.
- Scale your business with paid ads. Once you start making profits in your business, you can scale your business or income by investing in a paid advertising model.
PS: I have another post where I go more in-depth on how to make money with affiliate marketing. Check It Out!
FAQs!
Is Affiliate Marketing Digital Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a business model that uses a digital marketing strategy to market products online. Affiliate marketers use digital strategies to target, and engage audiences who are interested in their product or service and convert them to buy their affiliate offers.
Naturally, affiliate marketing kind of works differently from digital marketing but uses digital marketing strategies to reach an audience and convert them into potential customers.
What Is Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a general strategic marketing plan that businesses use to identify, build, connect, and engage with audiences with the intention of converting them into ideal customers.
How Can I Start A Career In Digital Marketing?
If you want to start a career in digital marketing, you’ll need to first put in the work to develop and refine your skill set in the area in which you want to start your career in.
Is A Digital Marketing Career Worth It?
Yes, a digital career is worth it, it is one of the growing markets and booming career paths right now online with a ton of interest and there is a high demand for products and services in this field. And if you can build a following that trusts you, you can sell to them over and over again. But there is also huge competition in this field as well.
What Is The Difference Between Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing?
Digital marketing is a concept or method that requires using the internet (electronic digital channels such as websites, email, social media, etc) to connect with prospects and promote products, services, or brands.
Tradition marketing is any type of marketing channel that isn’t online. It’s a model in which different offline channels are used to create relationships with customers through advertising and selling products using newspapers, TV and radio advertising, etc.
Digital marketing is more cost-effective than traditional channels, traditional marketing is an expensive form of marketing.
Traditional marketing is the oldest form of marketing, while Digital marketing is the new model marketing method.
What’s The Difference Between Digital Marketing and Social Marketing?
Digital marketing and social media marketing are the same things. Social media falls under digital marketing. In digital marketing, social media is used by others as a marketing strategy.
What’s The Difference Between Digital Marketing and Online Marketing?
Digital marketing is the same as online marketing or internet marketing. The term Online marketing simply means using the internet to communicate or promote a product, service, or brand to reach potential customers. Using YouTube videos, and Facebook Live to promote a product are all online marketing strategies.
That’s It Folks!
“Affiliate marketing and digital marketing” are two sides of the same coin. Consequently, affiliate marketing comes under the umbrella of digital marketing.
Affiliate marketing simply means promoting another person’s product for a commission.
And digital marketing is the process or method of driving traffic to your affiliate product or service by leveraging digital channels such as social media, search engines, email, etc to connect with prospects.
