Affiliate marketing is a popular term among Nigerian internet audience and rightly so.
This is a business that you can start without creating any tangible Product, no warehousing, All you need to succeed in affiliate marketing is an audience + your marketing and advertising skills.
What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing technique in which a company (the merchant or advertiser) compensates individuals or other businesses (the affiliates or publishers) for promoting and driving traffic or sales to their products.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Affiliate marketing works like this:
Affiliate Marketing is a referral type of business, we do it in our everyday life, for example, Let’s say a friend wants to sell his phone, but needs to sell it very quick to get the money, you then offer to find a quick buyer with the agreement of getting a commission from it.
That’s the basic building blocks of affiliate marketing.
But the ones we’re going to look at, is the systemized model, in which most things are automated and in one single platform.
How To Start Affiliate Marketing In Nigeria
The following applies to starting a profitable affiliate marketing business in Nigeria.
1. Choose An Affiliate Marketing Platform
Before choosing an affiliate marketing program, make sure it aligns with your audience and goals.
For example Let’s say you’re a fashion blogger, you’ll want to choose an affiliate program that promotes fashion items, e.g Jumia and konga. You’ll not want to be signing up for Bet9ja or Expertnaire affiliate, your audience may not or won’t be interested in these kinds of product.
But there’s always an exception, so you may as well try and see how it turns out, life as a whole is about trying, testing and seeing what works and what does not.
2. Register For The Affiliate
After identifying an affiliate program suitable with your audience and goals, you now need to sign up for the program on the program sign up page.
So let’s say you want to register for Jumia affiliate program you’ll search for “Jumia Affiliate Program Registration”, on google without the quotes, if you’re looking for Expertnaire Affiliate Program, you search for “Expertnaire Affiliate Program Registration”. You should get it by now, it’s just basically “company name + Affiliate Program Registration”.
After you might have reached the registration page, make sure to fill all fields correctly with your real details, your name, phone number, email and other important information.
3. If Accepted, Complete Profile Details And Generate Affiliate Links
After registration, your details will be reviewed and either accepted or declined.
If you’re being declined, your probably enterd an incorrect information or your audience/traffic source is not up to required standard or does not align with what the company wants, but you can always re-register or you can as well try another Platform.
If you’re accepted, complete your profile details and generate your affiliate links, all these are done at the platform dashboard, i can’t provide the steps here because i don’t know which program you’ll choose, but you can visit our page dedicated to affiliate marketing here, where you’ll find guides on how to register and generate affiliate links on popular affiliate marketing platforms in Nigeria.
4. Promote your affiliate link
This is the hardest part of affiliate marketing, the reason being that you now have to get people to visit, buy or subscribe to the product you’re promoting.
This is the reason i recommend you always go with affiliate programs that suit your audience and goals, with this, it will be easy to sell to them.
Why it will be a bit easy is that you can continue writing your blog posts, creating your youtube videos, post what you post on your facebook and whatsapp profile or host your podcasts still in your preferred niche and promote a relevant offer to your readers, trust me it’s more simpler this way.
Here’s a complete guide on how to promote your affiliate links.
⚠️ An Important point to note when promoting an affiliate Product is that, you should read and understand the terms and conditions of each affiliate marketing platform you choose very well, as most affiliate programs have restrictions to how or where you can promote their links.
5. Track Your Clicks, Sales And Commissions
This is the last but not the least step when it comes to affiliate marketing, tracking your affiliate clicks, sales and commission.
Tracking of clicks is very important as it will tell you if users are actually clicking on your affiliate links, so you know what to do, how to adjust and where to improve on.
Tracking of sales and commissions earned is done on the affiliate platform dashboard, so always check your dashboard regularly to know whether you’re heading in the right direction, if not you can start thinking of how and where to improve
5.1 How to track Affiliate link clicks
To track your affiliate link clicks, all you have to do is use a link shortener platform like bit.ly to shorten your affiliate links before sharing.
After shortening your links, you can now share on your blog, embed in image, share to youtube channel or your facebook profile etc.
You can always Login to your bit.ly account to check how many people clicked your affiliate link.
How to promote affiliate Links
How you promote an affiliate link will depend on the kind of affiliate, but below are some channels you can use/employ.
√ Share your contents with your whatsapp contacts & groups
√ Posting educative videos on your Youtube Channel
√ Share educative posts and videos on your Facebook page & profile
√ Share educative videos on your Tiktok account
√ Write engaging posts on www.nairaland.com
√ Create great contents on your Website/Blog
√ Share your contents to your Pinterest profile
√ Write detailed LinkedIn posts and include your affiliate links
✓ Answer questions on Reddit.com and leave a link to your content.
✓ Answer questions on Quora.com and leave a link to your content.
Important! Before choosing an affiliate marketing program, make sure it aligns with your audience and goals. For example Let’s say you’re a fashion content creator, writer or publisher, and most of your posts on your various social media accounts or your blog talks about fashion, you’ll want to choose an affiliate program that promotes fashion items, e.g Jumia and konga. You’ll not want to be signing up for Bet9ja or Webhosting affiliates, your audience may not or won’t be interested in these kinds of products. But there’s always an exception, so you may as well try and see how it turns out, life as a whole is about trying, testing and seeing what works and what does not.
How To Get Traffic To Your Affiliate Links
When it comes to affiliate marketing, the main problem is not always which affiliate program to choose, as there are a lot of them, it’s mainly about how you get people to buy from your affiliate links, and although it’s hard, it’s still more than possible to achieve.
Now what you need is an audience, your audience are the people that read your contents, watch your videos, interact and engage with your posts on social media, your blog or any other medium you use to share your thoughts.
To build an audience and get them to buy from your affiliate links, do what I’ve written below, this is what worked me and others and will surely work for you.
1. Start by providing value
The way to building an audience or a following is by providing value, value can be subjective depending on your niche, but if you can do it consistently, you’ll see people flock to follow you, why this happens is that people naturally are attached to something if they see some kind of value in it.
So how can you provide value?
- First pick a social media platform of your choice, example facebook, youtube, instagram, you can pick two and be active on them.
- Pick a niche: A niche is like a topic you talk about in your social media or blog, this is what people knows you for. Example of Niches include: Food, music, sports, digital marketing, digital skills acquisition, writing, copywriting, social media growth.
- Regularly update your audience with interesting contents, it maybe videos, text, images or infographics, just mix them, don’t focus on one type of content, variety is important.
- Regularly update your audience with educative contents, this can include how to guides, compilations of some best tools, important historical facts, current information that maybe helpful.
- Mix inspirational, motivational and fun contents, but make sure you don’t deviate too much from your primary topic (Your Niche).
- Be creative, leverage trending topics to create insightful contents.
- Be consistent, and make sure to engage with your audience by asking questions, replying to messages and comments etc.
2. Grow your audience
This is a business and you should be ready to take it as one, so you have to device means that will help grow your audience.
How can you grow your audience?
- You can grow your audience by running paid social media advertising.
- Leverage on trending topics to increase your reach.
- Do giveaways to drive enagement.
- Organize contests for a prize, this is a sure way to drive engagements too.
- Encourage your audience to share your contents.
3. Share your affiliate links strategically in your contents.
When it come to promoting your affiliate links to drive traffic, there are strategies that you have to follow in other to make your audience click and buy what you promote.
You should not make it so obvious that you’re selling to them, as this will drive them away, instead strive to offer the most valuable content you can and what you promote will sell itself.
Below methods of affiliate promotion can be combined to achieve great results, don’t just focus on one, try all avaliable means, combine them if need be.
Example methods on how to promote your affiliate links on various platforms
Video content creation method
Let’s say you’re a guitarist and a video content creator, you’ll certainly have gears that you use to make your videos, these can include the speaker, microphones, mixer, Amp and some stuffs like wireless transmitter and the likes.
So what you would do here is to find an online marketplace that sells all of those products you use to play. Check for their affiliate program and Signup to them, copy the links of those products and generate your affiliate links, finally save them somewhere. Now, each time you upload a video using any of these products, all you have to do is just copy the Affiliate link for that product and put in the description of your video.
Something like this: Mic: samsung aux 1 , you can buy it here (places Affiliate link),
Amp: Fender, you can buy it here (places Affiliate link).
You should get what I’m saying now.
This way, you are not directly selling to your audience, you’re just showing them the links to where they can buy the same gear you use and they’ll even appreciate you. By doing this, you make them happy while also making money at the same time.
Video review method (youtube & facebook)
Another way you can use to drive traffic to your affiliate links as a video content creator is by posting review content, for example let’s say you’re a guitarist again, you sure know how to use different gear like foot pedal, transmitters, amplifier, speaker and other stuffs like that.
What happens here is that even if you don’t have some of those gears yourself, you can get it from another company player that has it, and do a review on it, make a very nice and educative video on it.
Now, you can find the product on an E-commerce platform that sells it, then you generate your affiliate links and drop the link in the video description section, if you also upload your videos on facebook, you can add them in the comments section after you might have uploaded the video.
Reviews is still one of the best methods when it comes to affiliate marketing.
Nairaland method
If you haven’t heard of Nairaland before, then you really have to check it out at https://nairaland.com
Nairaland is a very crowded forum that what ever topic you talk about, you’ll surely have some visibility provided you do everything right.
Firstly, you have to register on Nairaland, using your email, after registration, login and continue.
Now look for a relevant section, and post your Articles, you can share link to your YouTube, facebook or tiktok videos along with your posts, make sure your posts doesn’t look like you want to sell something, instead it should be like a how to guide, review, list (like top 10).
Sometimes you’ll not give out the full article, but a small piece and a link pointing to your website, your YouTube or Facebook video to see the full content.
Since you are promoting affiliate links, you should see that posts or videos you link to from Nairaland are ones that have your affiliate links in them.
Note: Nairaland doesn’t allow users to post affiliate links directly, so you’ll have to be writing contents on your website, create videos on youtube or other platforms and share them along with the contents you’re posting there.
Paid social media Advertising + Email + whatsapp method
When it comes to any online business, paid ads remains the number one method to get fast results, and there’s no exceptions in affiliate marketing.
With facebook ads, you can grow your your audience by getting both their Whatsapp and email contacts at the same time. With this, you can now send your offers, to your email subscribers as well as your WhatsApp contacts.
To even make it much better, after you get a WhatsApp contact, you can also put them in a group that you’ll be sharing your free tips, tutorials, guides as well as your offers.
How this works is that you run an ads campaign on social media, with the target page being your WhatsApp account, when a prospect message you on WhatsApp, you request for him or her to save your contact, then you now send them a link to your landing page on your website and ask them to fill their email in other to get the offer. This can also be reversed and done the other way round.
This is the number one and fastest method if you want to see results in less than no time.
Note: Social Media advertising will cost you money, but if done correctly, you’ll recover all the money spent on ads and make long term profits in a very short period of time.
Creating a Niche Blog
Firstly what’s a Niche blog? A niche blog simply means that you’re basing your blog on one narrow topic instead of posting on several things at once.
Example of Niche blogs include, sports prediction blog, Music lyrics blog, Dog blog, Chicken rearing blog and so on.
These kinds of blog is the best nowadays because it makes you focus on one thing till you’re known for that, as time goes on your blog will be recognized as an authority blog on that topic. This will now make it easier for you to sell and promote your affiliate offers and even sell courses, all because your audience now sees you as a thought leader and will respect whatever you put out.
Some things you should know about Niche Blogging for affiliate marketing are:
✓ If you rely only on organic search traffic, it will take time before results start coming in.
✓ You have to publish very high quality search engine optimized contents regularly.
✓ You have to promote your contents like crazy, facebook, twitter, forums, paid ads are some ways to do that.
✓ You have to be patient as Blogging is not a get rich quick business.
Note: Niche Blogging has high returns if done correctly & with the right strategies, also note that you’ll need to invest time in money in creating high quality helpful content that will attract users and also rank on search engines simultaneously.
Affiliate Marketing Tools
These are some basic tools that you will need as a beginner affiliate marketer.
- Bit.ly, Link shortener for tracking affiliate link clicks.
- Google bard, for definitions & explanations.
- Google forms for collecting email addresses.
- MailChimp, Email marketing platform for sending emails.
- Systeme.io, For easy creation of landing pages and inbuilt email marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Platforms For Nigerians
As a Nigerian, most affiliate programs will not work for you, so i’ve carefully researched the affiliate programs that accept Nigerians on their platform, and most importantly these affiliate program are easy to join and start promoting.
1. Jumia Affiliate Program
Jumia Affiliate Program is a project of Jumia, an e-commerce site that primarily serves Africa. Through affiliate links, the program enables users, bloggers, website owners, and social media influencers to generate money by promoting and boosting sales of the products listed on Jumia’s website.
Using Jumia Affiliate you can promote a wide range of products including, fashion, electronics, phones and assesories, kitchen equipments, lifestyle products, beauty products, etc.
Sign up for Jumia Affiliate Program
2. Jumia Jforce
Jforce is an active sales platform of Jumia, this platform enables users to act like sales agent and close sales for a product, receive a commission after the product might have been delivered to the buyer. The difference between this and normal affiliate marketing is that you don’t send Affiliate links, instead you help someone buy something (products) using your Jforce account and then receive a commission for that sale.
Learn more on our JForce guide
3. Konga Affiliate Program
The Konga Affiliate Program is ran by the popular e-commerce platform and enables affiliates from Nigeria to market Konga’s products using a variety of online methods, including websites, social media, email marketing, and others. The affiliate receives a commission on the sale when a user clicks on a unique tracking link and purchases something on Konga’s website.
You can promote virtually anything that is available on Konga.com website.
Sign up for Konga Affiliate Program
4. Expertnaire
Expertnaire is a digital product marketplace where anybody from anywhere can buy and get access to online courses that teaches many things including how to make money, youtube marketing, PPC marketing and the likes. As an affiliate on Expertnaire, you get commissions by recommending digital products to your audience.
Read more on Expertnaire + Signup
5. Binance
Binance is a popular cryptocurrency platform, it offers users the chance to earn permanent commission from their referral program. Once you sign up on Binance and verify your account, you can start sharing your unique referral link to your audience, this particular affiliate program is general as anybody can trade cryptocurrency given some knowledge. Once your invite start trading, you earn up to 40% commission.
Read more on Binance referral + Signup
6. OctaFx Affiliate
OctaFx is a forex trading platform that accept Nigerians , as a user you can start earning commissions by referring your friends to register and trade on the OctaFx trading platform. You earn 1 USD per each standard lot traded by your referral, while they get a unique 100% deposit bonus.
Join Octafx Affiliate Program
7. Travelstart Affiliate Program
Travelstart is a flight and hotel booking platform avaliable for Nigerians, they have an affiliate program which anyone can register and start making money on the go. You’ll make 2% for every domestic paid booking made from an Affiliate link, 2.5% for every international paid booking made from an Affiliate link and a flat fee for all flights that do not originate in Nigeria.
Join Travelstart Affiliate Program
8. Whogohost Affiliate Program
Whogohost is a popular domain and web hosting platform in Nigeria, they offer affiliates the chance to earn money by sending buyers to any of the product on their website, except domain names registration. On Whogohost, an affiliate gets up to 15% on every paid shared hosting account, email hosting & site builder, as well as up to 5% on every paid cloud hosting.
Join whogohost affiliate program
Read also: 17 Legitimate Online Businesses That Pays Daily In Nigeria In 2023 Read also: 15 Great Business You Can Start With 30k As A Student In Nigeria
Frequently Asked Questions On Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria
Can I do affiliate marketing in Nigeria?
Yes, you can absolutely do affiliate marketing in Nigeria, You start by choosing an affiliate platform that accept Nigerians, E.g Jumia or Jforce, picking a product that will drive sales and marketing the product as hard as possible, with time you’ll start making money.
Is affiliate marketing easy to start?
Yes, Affiliate Marketing is easy to start, but making sales is not easy, so you will have to focus your attention on growing your audience, this the the biggest task you have ahead, use multiple channels to get new people to read your posts, watch your videos, attend your webinars, listen to your podcasts, combine both paid and organic methods to grow your audience and make sure you don’t lose them when you get them, use email marketing and wahtsapp marketing strategies to collect contacts so you can reach out to them at later date.
How to start affiliate marketing with no money in nigeria?
If you don’t have any money to invest in affiliate marketing business, you’ll have to pick Affiliate programs that doesn’t require money to register, Example include Jumia affiliate, JForce, Binance, Konga, Travelstart and the likes, secondly you’ll have to build your audience using organic means, either on social media or by search engine optimization or both, then you start promoting your affiliate links naturally inside your contents.
How to get traffic for affiliate marketing in Nigeria?
As a Nigerian, there are many ways you can get traffic to your affiliate product, they include creating engaging posts on Nairaland, filling your YouTube channel with educative videos, creating killer contents on your blog, building an audience on your social media platforms, indirect PPC advertising of your affiliate link using content Marketing.
Rounding Up
In conclusion, affiliate marketing is a powerful and accessible business model for Nigerians. By choosing the right platform, generating affiliate links, promoting products to a targeted audience, and tracking performance, you can successfully earn commissions and build a profitable online business. You just have to start and take advantage of the opportunities that affiliate marketing offers.
Hailey Fleming