Affiliate Marketing vs Digital Marketing: What’s the Difference

The world of digital marketing is vast with various online marketing channels on which effective strategies are built. Affiliate marketing is one of them. Well-known for creating easy passive income, affiliate marketers promote a company’s products and earn per-sale commissions when customers make a purchase.

What Is Digital Marketing?

The term “digital marketing” refers to reaching out to potential buyers and publicizing a product via digital mediums such as the Internet, mobile devices, and email. Awareness and recognition of a brand take on increasing importance in the modern era, and digital marketing is a crucial part of this process. Digital marketing includes the following operations –

• SEO boosts a website’s visibility in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to attract a larger, more targeted audience. On-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO are the three main subcategories of SEO.
• Social Media Marketing entails using sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest to increase web traffic and bolster an organization’s online profile. Hubspot and similar tools help marketers coordinate and plan content distribution across multiple channels.
• Pay-per-Click ads on Google or Facebook are a common way to get the word out about your digital content. Here, you pay the advertiser only when someone clicks on one of their ads.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a business model that allows a third party, known as an affiliate, to make money when promoting a product seller’s products or services. The payment is made when the customer purchases through the affiliate marketer. It involves three parties: the seller, the affiliate, and the customer.

The customer buys a product after clicking the affiliate’s tracking link. They don’t have to pay extra when they do this.

The affiliate promotes the sellers’ products to their audience to purchase through their affiliated link. If they do, the affiliate makes a commission on each sale.

The seller owns a product for sale and pays commissions to affiliates for each product they help sell. The seller could be as tiny as a one-person operation with a simple digital product, or a massive brand with several different e-commerce products for sale!

Ultimately, the goal of affiliate marketing is to generate revenue for both the seller and the affiliate. The seller gets sales revenue when the product is sold, while the affiliate makes a percentage or flat-rate commission.

The tools used in affiliate marketing are essentially the same tools used in digital marketing. This is because the goal of both types of marketing is basically to help get more customers and grow revenue for a business.

Some of the offline affiliate marketing methods include:

• Distributing flyers with an affiliate offer
• Referring radio listeners to a product or service provider
• Handing out business cards
• Promoting the offer in local classifieds

Because of how popular digital marketing is today, the term “affiliate marketing” commonly refers to affiliate marketing online – but the concept of affiliate marketing only refers to someone helping generate sales for someone else in exchange for a commission, no matter the medium. For more information about Affiliates and the latest news visit the site

Differences Between Digital Marketing vs Affiliate Marketing

Before we wrap up, here’s a quick look at the biggest differences between digital marketing and affiliate marketing. Think about these terms this way:

Digital Marketing involves the seller or product owner promoting products and services directly to customers via digital channels.

Affiliate marketing involves an affiliate promoting a seller’s products in exchange for a commission, usually through digital channels.

1. In contrast to affiliate marketing, which a third party can only conduct, digital marketing can be conducted by the seller or product owner themselves.
2. The main goals of any digital marketing campaign are an increase in website visitors and public recognition of the brand. However, one of the main draws of affiliate marketing is the potential for rapid accumulation of commissions from the sale of promoted products.
3. The elements involved in digital marketing are a product, a digital channel, and a customer. The elements involved in digital marketing include a product, a channel, an affiliate marketer, and a customer.
4. Digital marketing is a broader concept encompassing various digital marketing strategies and tools used by businesses to communicate and sell to their target audience. Affiliate marketing often encompasses digital marketing techniques by the affiliate to earn commissions based on product sales.
5. You’ll need expertise in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content marketing, data analysis, and video marketing to succeed in the field of digital marketing. Learn many of the same skills as a digital marketer, but with an emphasis on persuasive and direct response copywriting to succeed as an affiliate marketer.
6. To become a digital marketer, you need skills such as SEO, content marketing, data analysis, and video marketing. To become an affiliate marketer, you need to learn many of the same skills as a digital marketer, but with a focus on persuasion and direct response copywriting.

 

How Much Money Can You Make as an Affiliate?

The amount of money you make as an affiliate marketer depends on several factors, such as how long you have been doing it, which platforms you’re using, and how much time and effort you’ve put into it.

With that said, here are some stats that can give you an idea of how much you could make.

The average passive income for an affiliate, according to PayScale, is $52,590. The bottom 10% make $39,000 and the top 10% make $73,000. That means even if you are just starting, you can expect to make thousands of dollars after you find your footing.

According to Glassdoor, affiliate marketers make even more. Their average income is $66,029, ranging between $35,000 for the low end and $124,000 for the top end.

ZipRecruiter’s statistics place the average passive income of affiliate marketers at a whopping $74 per hour for a total of $154,700 per year. The lowest-paid makes $11,000, and the highest-paid makes $401,500.

 

Choosing Affiliate Marketing or Digital Marketing

So you can see, both do not necessarily work exclusively but together as a whole for an online business. To gain traffic on your affiliate website/blog, you will need to practice good SEO or if you are an influencer-turned-affiliate, you need to know about social media marketing. Ultimately, both affiliate and digital marketers help promote products. With the correct approach, both can be used for business advantage by reaching a much wider audience and selling a product much faster.