Affiliate Marketing

Instagram (IG) is many things. It has over a billion users, and Instagrammers have deep pockets. For example, among adult users, 31 percent make over $75,000 annually. IG users “like” over 4.2 billion and share 95 million posts daily. Facebook got the IG acquisition correct along with WhatsApp (the jury is still out on Oculus VR). IG is moving in the right direction and stomping on its competitors like Snap and TikTok. Storylines like these make affiliate marketers drool except for one problem, IG is link-unfriendly.

To succeed in affiliate marketing, a publisher needs to deploy thousands of links in multiple places to increase the number of clicks and conversions. On IG, the only place to put a hyperlink is in one’s bio.

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you might be wondering, what is a recurring affiliate program? A recurring affiliate program pays a commission indefinitely. Commissions come from ongoing customer payments. For instance, a customer pays $60 monthly to a marketing software company, and the affiliate gets $24 (a 40 percent commission rate) each month. Many merchants pay indefinitely alongside customer payments, but some merchants limit recurring commissions to a few or several billing periods, for example, the first six months.

Affiliate programs that pay recurring commissions function like regular programs, but the difference can be a lower recurring payout compared to a higher one-time payment. For example, a program pays a 20 percent recurring commission on a $30 monthly bill (a $6 monthly commission) compared to a one-time commission of $24 (80%) for the first payment. Secondly, recurring commissions can grow to sizable passive income streams, but customer cancellations will decrease earnings.

Can you make money with bitcoin and crypto affiliate programs? Yes, you can. Demand and access are increasing, millions of people trade cryptos, adoption is growing among institutional investors and big companies, and skeptics like Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, are coming around. News about digital currencies and blockchain are breaking daily with M&A activity occurring frequently. Case in point, Binance acquired CoinMarketCap, a leading data source for the industry. Bad actors, legal dramas, and theft will also make headlines, so stay close to developments.

Udemy is a global marketplace for e-learning and teaching online. Students master new skills by learning from an extensive library of courses in 15 main categories and 100+ subcategories. Its bestselling categories include web, mobile, and app development, IT and software, business, marketing, and personal growth. A few instructors have made millions of dollars (mostly because of internal marketing support and partnerships with Udemy).