Anyone who uses the internet can become an affiliate publisher – both private individuals and companies that communicate with other users through chosen platforms or tools. Thanks to social media and messaging apps, you don’t need to have your own website. All you need is the willingness to act and an idea for how to promote selected brands and their products. No technical knowledge or other specialist skills are required.

The publisher and their role in affiliate marketing

The affiliate publisher is crucial, because without the publisher there is no sale. Their task is to bring the advertiser’s offer to the target audience. Publishers are increasingly good at precisely targeting their publications, which is why they generate more and more traffic to advertisers’ websites and are an important business partner in affiliate marketing. As affiliate marketing becomes more significant in advertisers’ promotional activities, publishers have become more aware of their role.

The primary role of an affiliate publisher is to promote the advertiser’s products or services within their own audience community. The publisher uses unique affiliate links that make it possible to track the results of their activities. This way, the advertiser can measure campaign performance and correctly attribute commissions.

The publisher therefore acts as an intermediary between the brand and the end customer – they generate traffic, build interest, encourage users to buy and earn commissions on the sales they generate. Importantly, publishers operate independently: they decide for themselves which programs they join, which products they promote and which tools they use. The advertiser pays for specific sales results, which gives them confidence in their promotional investment. The key to a successful partnership is the engagement of both sides. Advertisers often provide publishers with discount codes so they can share them on their websites, platforms or social media. Thanks to this, the publishers’ audiences are more likely to follow their recommendations and visit the advertisers’ stores.

Additionally, as part of the cooperation, advertisers share XML feeds and banners with publishers, so the publisher has full freedom of action and can test the tools that drive the highest sales conversion. The affiliate network guarantees publishers that they can work with major brands without the need to sign additional individual contracts. It is enough to register with an affiliate network and apply to a program to start affiliate cooperation with a selected brand and online store.

Who can become a publisher in affiliate marketing?

In affiliate marketing, almost any person or company that has a suitable communication channel with potential customers can become a publisher. There are no strict limitations here – the key is having your own website or social media account that allows you to promote affiliate offers.

Examples of people and entities that often become publishers include:

1. Bloggers and content creators – people running niche blogs who publish content related to a specific industry (e.g. beauty, technology, finance) and can promote relevant products or services.

2. Influencers – individuals with a large following on social media (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok). Influencers are highly effective at recommending products because they enjoy the trust of their community.

3. Niche websites and industry portals – owners of websites focused on specific topics (health, sports, technology, parenting) who can promote products tailored to their users’ interests.

4. Coupon and cashback websites – platforms that offer discounts, promotions or cashback on purchases and effectively direct users to partner stores.

5. Price comparison sites – portals that compare offers from online stores and promote products based on the best available prices.

6. Newsletter publishers (email marketing) – owners of large mailing lists who regularly send product offers and promotions to their subscribers.

7. Marketing and SEM agencies – companies running PPC campaigns (Google Ads, Facebook Ads) for affiliate programs, generating traffic to advertisers’ websites.

8. SEO specialists and owners of sites based on organic traffic – people who leverage organic traffic from search engines and promote affiliate products through well-optimised content.

How affiliate links work for publishers

An affiliate link is the simplest affiliate tool. It is a unique URL leading to any page of the advertiser’s website which, once processed by the affiliate system, becomes an affiliate link with the publisher’s unique ID encrypted inside it.

We’ve collected practical examples of earning money with affiliate links in the ebook:

How to generate an afiliate link in 30 seconds

Benefits for publishers in affiliate marketing

If you’re wondering why it’s worth getting into affiliate marketing, here are a few key reasons:

Affiliate links work for you even while you sleep

By improving your skills in creating engaging campaigns, you can significantly increase your income. Well-matched products, linked to evergreen content, keep working for you even when you’re asleep. What’s more, a single piece of content can earn money for you not just for days or weeks, but for years. That’s why it’s worth investing time in creating content that is evergreen, always relevant and genuinely desired by your audience. At the same time, you should test different tools and their placement across your online properties.

Affiliate marketing is passive income

Unlike a traditional job, where you earn money by sitting at a desk, affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to earn all the time – even when you’re travelling or on holiday. Once you place affiliate links on your website or social media, they remain active 24/7. Affiliate links don’t expire – they can work for weeks, months and years, which means you can keep earning from them continuously.

You work where you want and when you want

If you’re the kind of person who hates working in an office, affiliate marketing is made for you! You can promote advertisers’ products anytime and anywhere – at home, on vacation, on a train. You work the way that’s comfortable for you and from wherever you like. By recommending products from the advertiser’s store, you don’t take responsibility for their distribution or any potential issues. The advertiser handles all customer questions and complaints and is the one in direct contact with buyers. Your job as a publisher is not customer service. No one will contact you demanding explanations about purchased products. You’re the middleman between the store and the customer, but you are not liable to consumers. So you don’t need to worry about being held responsible for any misunderstandings between them.

As a publisher, you invest only your time

Most new businesses require financial investment… but not affiliate publishing. If you already have your own website, blog, fanpage or other social media profile, you can start your affiliate journey. The only thing you invest is your time – to effectively promote affiliate programs.

You act independently and make your own decisions

When you become a publisher in an affiliate network, everything depends on you. You set your own goals, choose the products that interest you, and decide how much time you want to spend on your activities. There are no deadlines, no contracts, no regulations imposed on you. Everything is entirely up to you!

By creating content, you build your own SEO

Good content is the starting point for building strong SEO. You can generate substantial organic traffic from search engines if you learn how to properly apply SEO principles. People are constantly looking for information online, so it’s worth focusing on the right use of SEO, choosing the right keywords and building your position in search results.

Proven ways to succeed as a Publisher

Recommend what you know – and what’s truly worth recommending

There’s an unlimited number of products you can promote. But remember: the best approach is to choose those you know, have used yourself, and would happily recommend to anyone. Always think first and foremost about your audience – recommend valuable products to them and success will follow.

As mentioned before, building audience trust is the most important factor in effective affiliate marketing. The fastest way to lose that trust is to promote products you’ve never used or that don’t match the nature of your site. Also make sure you recommend a product rather than push people to “buy now”. The more credible you are, the more likely your audience will come back to you for future recommendations.

Focus on honest, thorough reviews

Concentrate on detailed and reliable reviews of the products you recommend – this gives your audience confidence that they can trust you. Make sure they get concrete value. You can compare products with each other, list not only advantages but also disadvantages if you notice any. The key is to be honest from the very beginning. If you don’t stick to this rule, your audience may quickly lose trust in you.

Use multiple channels

Remember, you have many options for placing affiliate links. If you run a blog and related social media accounts, you can successfully promote advertisers’ products across all these channels. Test different strategies and analyse which ones bring you the best results. Develop multiple affiliate approaches to achieve the highest possible performance.

Choose campaigns wisely

Regardless of your current marketing skill level, one rule always applies: you’ll earn less promoting bad products than good ones. So take the time to get to know the products before you start advertising them. It’s worth thoroughly understanding the offer and reading opinions about it, so you can be sure it’s genuinely worth recommending to your audience.

Stay up to date with trends

This is another key pillar of affiliate marketing. If you want to succeed, you need to stay on top of the latest trends – not only shopping trends, but also technology and marketing trends. New marketing techniques are constantly emerging that can help you in your affiliate activities. So always keep your finger on the pulse!

Recommend products from different advertisers

Don’t focus on just one store – promote products from various affiliate programs. Promoting only a single affiliate program limits you a lot, because you’re tied to just one commission rate. By working with multiple advertisers, you can present a wider range of products and compare which stores give you the best conversion. This will help you build the most effective affiliate strategy.

Optimise your actions and track conversions

Let’s say you promote a product on your site using affiliate links. If your site currently gets 5,000 users per month and the conversion rate is 2%, you generate 100 redirects to the store. To reach 200 redirects, you’d need another 5,000 users or… increase your conversion rate to 4%! Which is easier? Instead of spending months trying to double your organic traffic, you can relatively quickly increase conversions by 2% by carefully matching the products you recommend to your audience. A well-chosen product, consistent with the content you publish, is the key to success in affiliate marketing.

Analyse and test

It’s important to know where your traffic is coming from and to understand the demographics of your audience. This will help you tailor your messaging to achieve the best possible affiliate results. The better you know your users, the easier it will be to target your promotions.

Traffic sources can include organic visits, paid traffic, social media, referrals, email, or direct visits. You can easily check all of this in Google Analytics, which will show you data such as:

• geographic location

• age

• gender

• time of day

• device (smartphone or computer)

This knowledge makes it much easier to run effective campaigns and, as a result, earn higher commissions.

 

10 reasons to start working as an affiliate publisher

Thanks to online work, we can pursue our passions in the offline world – and vice versa. A regular full-time job often gives us the opportunity to develop our creative passions online. Anyone who works on the internet knows how much effort it takes to run online projects and how many areas need to be covered to present your work or skills to an audience.

That’s why it’s so important that, regardless of the scale on which you operate online, affiliate marketing lets you monetise any type of online creation.

We’ve already written in previous articles about who can become a publisher and how to choose affiliate programs in order to earn as much as possible as a virtual publisher. Now we want to focus on why becoming an affiliate publisher is the fastest way to monetise online work and what key benefits it brings.

Here are 10 reasons why it’s worth starting your journey with affiliate marketing and becoming an affiliate publisher!

1. Affiliate publisher – online work with no entry barrier – you don’t incur any costs

The first association with online work is usually an online store. Immediately you see in your mind all the challenges you need to face to start selling online in this form. You also can’t open an online store without a proper budget. You have to take into account the cost of launching the store system itself, investing in the products you want to sell, and spending money on online advertising.

Another way to make money online is paid or barter cooperation with well-known brands. But here too, you first need to build up the reach of your media channels before you can even start talking to brands. So you must first invest a lot of time – and therefore money – to reach the required thresholds. We wrote about other options for online work in the article Earning Money Online. Most of them come with many conditions you need to meet before they start generating profit. Most of them – but not affiliate marketing 🙂

To become an affiliate publisher and work online for advertisers in affiliate programs, you don’t have to incur any costs. Registering with an affiliate network and joining affiliate programs is, was and will always be free for publishers. The same applies to affiliate tools such as affiliate links, product widgets or XML feeds. Using these tools as part of cooperation with affiliate networks is always free for publishers.

Why doesn’t an affiliate publisher have to pay to participate in an affiliate network?

An affiliate publisher always has free access to marketing tools within the affiliate network because, for both the network and the advertisers, the most important thing is to build long-term cooperation with publishers.

The goal is for the collaboration to develop steadily – even if at the beginning it doesn’t bring measurable results to anyone. If publishers had to pay to use affiliate tools, most of them would never start working with networks at all, or would end their cooperation very quickly.

Thanks to free access and lots of possibilities, affiliate publishers can calmly test:

• which affiliate tools work best for them

• which ones they like the most

• which online spaces or media convert best

• which advertiser brings them the highest earnings through online cooperation

If you’re just starting your adventure with affiliate marketing, learn more about the most popular affiliate payment models in the article: What are billing models – CPS, CPL, CPC?

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2. You can start working as a publisher even with a small audience

In classic online marketing and influencer marketing, the key condition for starting cooperation with bigger – and even smaller – brands, where you get a guaranteed fee for specific promotional activities, is reach. It’s the first metric advertisers analyse before deciding to work with a creator.

However, to become an affiliate publisher, you don’t need to meet such requirements. Already at the very beginning of your journey with blogging, running a social media channel or a niche website, you can register in an affiliate network as a publisher and start working with affiliate programs. The earlier you begin as an affiliate publisher, the sooner you’ll start earning from online work.

When registering as a publisher in an affiliate network, you need to list your online properties (website, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), but you don’t have to guarantee any specific reach from the start. What matters is that your channels are valuable and deliver good content – the rest will come with time. By starting early as an affiliate publisher, you can calmly test:

• the potential of different affiliate tools

• how your audience reacts to specific creatives and formats

There is another very important point: working online as an affiliate publisher does not require you to run a blog or a niche portal. A YouTube channel or an account on Facebook or Instagram is enough.

Of course, affiliate cooperation will give you slightly different possibilities depending on the medium you use, but the principle of placing affiliate links is identical in each case. You can also share links via messengers such as Skype or WhatsApp, or even by email! As you can see, you don’t need to be a well-known blogger for your online work to bring measurable results.

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3. You can work with big, well-known brands without extra contracts

The advantages of working as a publisher in an affiliate network aren’t limited to free access to affiliate tools. You also get access to hundreds of affiliate programs, which you can join with a single click. When you create a publisher account, you accept the affiliate network’s terms of cooperation, which means you can work with the stores, brands and services offered there without having to sign individual contracts with each of them. So if you have a dream brand you’d like to work with, but you don’t yet feel ready to approach them directly with a collaboration proposal, first check whether they’re available in one of the affiliate networks.

4. As a publisher, you’ll find an affiliate program for every niche

No matter what topic you cover online, in an affiliate network like webePartners you’ll definitely find programs that match your niche. Why? Because the network offers nearly 400 affiliate programs for online stores (and more), selling products across hundreds of product categories.

Affiliate programs are divided into 19 categories, such as: fashion, home & garden, health & beauty, kids, electronics, gadgets, books-music-movies, jewellery & watches, groceries, weapons & militaria, sport & recreation, loans & finance, courses, services, erotica, automotive, urban architecture, office & business, and multi-category.

In the webePartners database there are nearly 3 million products ready to be promoted online. So even if you operate in a very narrow niche, there is virtually no chance you won’t find a product you can earn on by recommending it.

Affiliate networks offer from a dozen to several hundred affiliate programs.

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5. You can use affiliate tools free of charge

Tracking the traffic and transactions generated by an affiliate publisher is possible thanks to affiliate links. They are embedded in every creative downloaded from the affiliate network. That’s why you can say that affiliate marketing is based primarily on affiliate links. It’s a very simple tool that allows you to recommend products on any platforms and websites.

 

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6. As a publisher you build your expert image

When you run an online project or work in social media, the turning point is when you start sharing your knowledge. The more often you share valuable insights, the more willingly your audience will listen to you. That’s how you build your position as an expert.

Trust is currency. In today’s world, trust is the most important asset. As an expert, you gain the trust of your audience – and that’s the most valuable “currency” you can have. Once you reach a high level of trust, you don’t need to “sell” directly. It’s enough to share honest knowledge about tried-and-tested products or services, and your audience will gladly follow your recommendations.

7. Every online space is good for working as a publisher

A blog, YouTube channel, Facebook fanpage, Instagram profile – as well as Pinterest, Snapchat, Messenger, email – any place where you can publish your content with active outbound links is a good space to earn as a publisher. As an affiliate publisher, you can monetise many channels at the same time. If any limitations exist, they’re purely technological (no option to paste a clickable link) – apart from that, the only limit is your imagination.

It’s worth testing different sites and placements, different ways of presenting promotional content, and then analysing the results. Working online as an affiliate publisher, you’re not penalised when your actions don’t bring results. Neither the advertiser nor the network imposes on you how you should work, when you should start any activity or how involved you should be.

You can participate in affiliate programs very actively or only to a small extent. There is just one condition: your activities must aim to help the advertiser achieve better results, support their sales and promote their brand. Spamming and deliberately acting to the detriment of the advertiser are prohibited. And if the advertiser or affiliate network ever has any doubts about your activities, you will definitely be notified. Adapting to any suggestions from the advertiser will not end the cooperation – quite the opposite, it will help it grow, which is exactly what affiliate marketing is about.

8. The final decision is always up to the publisher

As an affiliate publisher, you have a lot of independence. You decide which programs you want to promote and when you start or end cooperation.

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You’re also free to decide how much time you devote to it. By testing different tools and different affiliate programs, you eventually reach the point where you know exactly which programs are worth your effort and are most profitable for you. That’s why you can stop your activities in any program at any time if it doesn’t bring measurable benefits. You can simply stop publishing affiliate links or widgets for specific advertisers whenever you like.

What’s more, you can remove all links and other creatives you’ve published so far as part of those programs. But think carefully before you do it. Affiliate links and other creatives don’t have an expiry date. This means that as long as they remain active on your channels, they will keep working for you. Even if you stop any new activity in a given affiliate program, any commissions generated will still be credited to your publisher account in the affiliate system.

9. As an affiliate publisher you don’t need to run a business

Anyone can become an affiliate publisher! You don’t need knowledge of website development, advanced tech infrastructure or a strong in-house affiliate team. Most publishers do perfectly well on their own, using ready-made and free technologies such as WordPress (for blogs), YouTube (for video content), or Facebook and Instagram (for social media).

What’s more, you don’t need to run a registered business to work and earn as an affiliate publisher. For people who don’t operate a business, affiliate networks provide the option to generate a payout document (invoice/statement) directly in the affiliate system, and based on that the earned funds are paid out. Payments are always made via bank transfer to the account number provided by the publisher. So there’s no need to have a registered company – the only requirement is having a bank account.

We’ve dedicated a separate article to how to settle income earned from affiliate marketing when working online without running a business: How to settle income from affiliate marketing?

And if you’re still before your first payout as an affiliate publisher, you’ll definitely be interested in this article: First commission payout step by step.

10. Affiliate publisher – online work without constraints

Registering with a chosen affiliate network does not close the door to other projects and collaborations. Most publishers work with two, three or even several affiliate networks at the same time. At the same time, they run direct collaborations with other companies and even sell their own products. And that’s the biggest advantage of working online as an affiliate publisher – you have complete freedom in how you grow your online activity.

As an affiliate publisher, you’re not bound by contracts that restrict your other projects. Unfortunately, that’s often the case when you enter into direct cooperation with a brand – various restrictions may appear that temporarily block some of your activities. Affiliate marketing does not exclude any other type of cooperation outside the affiliate network. You can have separate contracts with different stores or services, receive barter deals or create sponsored content. You’re free to take on any additional paid collaborations.

Affiliate cooperation can therefore be both a solid main source of income and a great side option if you have an idea for generating extra revenue that accrues “on the side” of your core business.

An affiliate publisher is a unique form of online work!

If you had any doubts about whether online work is for you, we hope this article has cleared them up! If you want to learn more practical tips on how to earn online, be sure to read: How to make money online with affiliate marketing? Become a publisher and earn from recommendations.

Remember, affiliate marketing can be a great way to generate additional income, but it can also become your main source of livelihood from online activity. It’s an excellent choice for many reasons:

• no one dictates how you should work online

• you devote as much time to it as you want

• you don’t need technical knowledge or professional platforms

You can always count on the support of an affiliate manager as well. Give it a try – it doesn’t cost you anything! 🙂