The Ultimate Guide To Affiliate Marketing In Nigeria

You may have stumbled on a number of bloggers who have bragged about how they make hundreds and thousands of dollars from affiliate marketing, yeah? Or you have friends who do not work 9-5 jobs, are always working on their computers, are not involved in cyber-fraud, but are always having enough money to brag about and pay bills with?

That’s because they most likely sell products online, or are affiliate marketers for companies. Affiliate marketing remains one of the most lucrative online money-making opportunities for both affiliate marketers and companies in the world, and Nigeria is not left out. People legitimately make money from affiliate marketing in Nigeria from the comfort of their homes daily, and you too can.

Imagine a marketing program that can increase company sales 10 percent to 25 percent and earn your huge sums effortlessly without working a 9-5 job or paying a dime. That’s affiliate marketing for you. Sounds too good to be true, yeah?

Many Nigerian online marketers and web savvy individuals are also making tons of money from affiliate marketing programmes in the country and beyond and you too can join them with the knowledge you’d be getting from this post, so fasten your seatbelt.

All you’d need is your website, commitment, a marketing strategy, and an eye for valuable online affiliate marketing programs.

In this post, you are going to learn what affiliate marketing is, the basics of affiliate marketing, why you should do affiliate marketing in Nigeria, how to get started with affiliate marketing in Nigeria, and we’d wrap up with the best affiliate marketing programmes in Nigeria.

Are you ready? Let’s get started.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Put simply, affiliate marketing means that you basically have to recommend a product or service to your audience and readers using custom tracking links, and then get a referral commission every time someone makes a purchase using your link. Affiliate marketing is a type of online performance-based marketing in which a business pays a commission to one or more of its affiliates for each visitor or customer that visits their website via the affiliate’s website through a custom link.

Because many top brands have huge marketing budgets and running costs that they have to meet, affiliate marketing becomes a viable option for them and a very good one for you as a blogger or content marketer to make fast money from the comfort of your home.

Many product companies such as fashion, web-hosting, etc., usually run affiliate programmes. You can simply sign up for their programme, get your unique tracking link, write reviews about their products or any other marketable content, then strategically input your custom link in the post. You will get paid once anyone visits their website from yours and makes a purchase using your link.

The Basics of Affiliate Marketing

Here are some basic and common terms you should know about affiliate marketing:

Merchant: This is the retailer, brand or company that you market for
Affiliate: This is the advertiser or publisher (you and me) who promote, advertise and make sales for companies using our affiliate links
Affiliate marketplace: Also called the “network”, this is the platform that connects merchants with affiliates and also manages payments e.g. ShareASale
Affiliate link: This is a special tracking link obtained from your merchant to track the progress of your affiliate promotion.
Affiliate ID: Similar to the affiliate link, many affiliate programs offer a unique ID or HTML code which you can add to any page on your site where the product is advertised.
Landing pages: This is a unique product sales or demo page that you can use to advertise your affiliate link. Unlike websites, landing pages are more purposeful and convert leads better.
Link cloaking: Most of the affiliate tracking links are either too ugly or long. You can use URL shortener like Thirsty Affiliates to turn ugly links into links that can be read and understood by your readers.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria

Great! So now that you have a basic understanding of what affiliate marketing is, as well as some common terms used in the industry, you should now learn why you need become one too. Asides the money making benefits, there are a few others.

Affiliate Marketing is Profitable

Affiliate marketing is perhaps, one of the most profitable online money making opportunities in the world. In Nigeria, affiliate marketing is also very profitable, as there are many merchant companies and web savvy online marketers.

Mr. Pascal Okafor, for instance, a blogger, earned ₦1,000,000 from Konga.com affiliate programme, when he won the award for Best Affiliate Marketer.

If you blog on specific niches such as web technology and fashion, you can be sure to earn lots of money for every customer you refer to buy. You only need to refer your readers from your content and ads to make huge money.

Affiliate Marketing Attracts Low Cost

With affiliate marketing, you do not need large investments, an office space, staff, expensive customer support services or huge overhead costs. All you need is your website (which should cost as low as $20), high website traffic and an excellent content that is strategically marketed.

Also if you don’t have any money to start, you can use free social media, website creation and plugin tools to start your affiliate marketing business.

You Do Not Need To Create or Own a Product

As a plus to you, you don’t need to own or create any product as an affiliate marketer. All you need to do, as the name implies, is to select the products to sell, get the affiliate links and market already created products that are owned by the merchants.

Affiliate Marketing is the Easiest Online Business

This is the easiest online business to start since the merchants do all the hard work like making products, product delivery, handling money transactions etc. Affiliate marketers are not responsible for any of these tasks. All that they do is to focus on promoting, marketing and selling their affiliate links on their own performance-based terms.

You Can Earn Money While Sleeping

Yes, you can basically earn money from affiliate marketing while you sleep. Once you have your affiliate links strategically placed on your high traffic website(s), people can visit your site and links whenever and from wherever they are, without you even being online.

If they like the product, they can easily buy it by just clicking the given links.
The only difficult thing to do is to check your inbox to know whether sales have been made via your link or whether commissions have been paid. I bet that doesn’t sound difficult to you.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing in Nigeria

In this section, you are going to learn a step-by-step guide to becoming an affiliate marketer in Nigeria. First, here’s what you’ll need to get you started:

A website (learn how to create a very cheap WordPress website here or hire a website designer here)
A website niche that matches your preferred product. This would make sure you don’t end up trying to sell everything and over-promote your website
You need an excellent niche and product-related content where you can strategically market your links for visitors to visit
Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies to ensure your content is easily and quickly accessible by interested readers so they can make purchases using your link.
Use email marketing services like MailChimp to effectively automate your communication with potential leads. This can help increase website traffic as well.
Use effective and common URL shorteners like ThristyAffiliates to shorten your links and track which ones perform best. Shorter and less intrusive links get more clicks.

Step 1: Define your Niche

Before even setting up your blog, you should define your blogging niche according to your expertise, your passion, and interest for the topic, the profitability of the niche, whether there are many bloggers and affiliates in your niche.

You should also be sure that there are affiliate programmes in your niche, since your blog is profit intended. In many cases, fashion, technology, fitness, dieting and lifestyle niches are always good picks.

Step 2: Search for Affiliate Programme

After defining your niche, you should now search for affiliate programmes that you can sign up for and obtain your custom links.

Keep in mind the relationship between your niche and the affiliate programme, the type of merchants and their offerings, the marketability of their products and services, and how valuable their commission is.

Choosing the right programme will make your affiliate marketing career worth your while. You can use platforms like SearchASale or ClickBank to find the best affiliate marketing programmes in the world.

Step 3: Website Setup

This is the web design and set up stage. Here, you should buy a domain name and web hosting from a reputable company and also get a reliable Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress (use www.wordpress.org instead of www.wordpress.com) for your content publishing and affiliate marketing.

WordPress is particularly suited for affiliate marketing because of its amazing plugins that make the process seamless for you.

Step 4: Create Marketable Content

Now that your site is set up and you’ve signed up for good affiliate programmes, this is the time for you to create marketable content or banner ads that can increase your web traffic and get people clicking your link via the content.

Ever heard of the overused, but evergreen phrase “content is king”? Well, this is where your skill and expertise in content marketing and niche advantage comes to play. You can create content like product reviews, infographics, answers to trending questions, support materials, etc. Note that the goal of these contents is not to profit the merchant, but to quicken your marketing bottom line, which is to get people to click on your link and make sales.

Step 5: Build Your Audience

Building an audience for your site will, in some ways, follow naturally once you start producing excellent and useful content. An interested audience will not only bring you consistent traffic but also result in consistent sales for you.

You can build your audience with SEO techniques, social media promotions, guest post on high traffic sites, email list marketing, paid advertising, and many more.

Step 6: Affiliate Marketing Content

This is the golden money-making stage. It’s the real deal. This is where you promote your created content on your website.

Your on-page content promotion can include, but not limited to; product reviews, banner ads, in-text content links, email campaigns, social media promotions, e-books, infographics, video captions on YouTube, discounts and giveaways like coupons, etc. Once a purchase is made using your link via these promotions, you will automatically get paid a commission by your affiliate company.

Best Affiliate Marketing Programmes in Nigeria

1. Konga Affiliate Programme

Konga is currently Nigeria’s second largest online retail and e-commerce platform, the company’s website is ranked 28 as the most visited website in Nigeria and has over 100,000 products that you can promote as one of their affiliates.

The company runs an official affiliate program that pays you up to 9% commission on every completed sale but your total earnings would be calculated at the end of every month and paid directly into your registered bank account. With Konga’s affiliate programme, having a website is not necessary but can be an advantage for you.

Here’s how you can get started with this programme:

Sign up to become an affiliate by filling the sign-up form
Log in to your affiliate account to choose which promotional material to use
Embed links on your website, in your social media campaigns or in an email promotion.
If any visitor browses Konga’s site via your link and makes an order, it’ll be registered as a sale for you
Konga will review and approve the sale
You will receive a 9% commission off every sale, accumulated and paid to you on the 30th of every month.
And that’s it!

2. Jumia Affiliate Programme

Jumia is unarguably Nigeria’s largest and most trusted online and e-commerce store. They currently rank 8 on Alexa.com. Also, the company is one of the Nigerian companies that pay the most commission in their affiliate programme. With Jumia’s affiliate program, you simply have to drive traffic to Jumia’s online store by choosing from their hundreds of thousands of products to advertise to customers and make money when your visitors buy from them.

Here’s how to go about their programme:

Sign up to become an affiliate on the affiliate website
Log in to your affiliate dashboard to choose which product to market
Get promotional material like deep links, banners, feeds from them
Embed links on your website, in your social media campaigns or in an email promotion.
If any visitor visits Jumia’s site via your link and buys anything, it’ll be registered as a sale for you
Jumia will review and approve the sale
You will receive an 11% commission off every sale, accumulated and paid to you on the 30th of every month.
And you’re game!

3. DealDey Affiliate Programme

DealDey is another Nigerian online e-commerce store that provides a medium for advertising products and services at greatly discounted rates. The huge discounts in their goods and services are aimed at attracting a large customer base interested in getting value for their money, which can be a good startup for any affiliate marketer in Nigeria.

The DealDey affiliate program is amazing because it allows you to earn by promoting deals using links and banners which are specifically designed to be easily shared on your website, blog, on social media or directly by inviting your friends.

Once a sale is realized through the clicking of these links by visitors, you automatically get paid a commission up to ₦500 but in most cases, the commission is flexibly set by DealDey.

4. PayPorte Affiliate Programme

PayPorte is yet another e-commerce store and is regarded as Nigeria’s preferred online retail store when it comes to quality of products.

PayPorte has, since, its launch, thrived to ensure it caters to a wide demography that ranges from the youths and to the young urban professionals, providing a wide variety of products including fashion and accessories, fabrics, furniture, home appliances, tech gadgets and more.

And their affiliate programme is even as cool as their regular offerings. Here’s how to get started:

Register for free on their website
Automatically earn ₦1,000 upon registration
Log in to your affiliate dashboard to choose which product to market
Get promotional material like referral links, and banners from them
Use links on your website, in your social media campaigns or in an email promotion
If any visitor visits their site via your link and buys anything, it’ll be registered as a sale for you
PayPorte will review and approve the sale
You will earn 5-10% commission off every sale, accumulated and paid to your bank account
And there you go!

5. Wakanow Affiliate Programme

Wakanow, a Nigerian company, is one of Africa’s leading online travel, tourism, and hospitality companies, with operations spread across the continent.

Wakanow’s affiliate programme is modeled to enable travel agencies and individuals who engage in selling travel products and customers even to sell highly discounted Wakanow travel products and plans like flight, hotels, airport pickups, tour packages, etc., to other customers and make a huge profit.

Benefits of Wakanow’s Affiliate Programme

If you successfully drive traffic to their website and any lead makes a purchase using your link, you get:

Up to 40% discount on Hotel Rack Rates for booking of any of their 508,000 partnered domestic and international hotels
Discounts on every airline for domestic and international airline referrals
Discounts up to 20% on Wakanow.com rates for referrals on Visa processing services
Up to 5% discount on Wakanow.com rates for airport pickup services in over 45,000 locations
Up to 10% Discount on Wakanow.com rates for every holiday packages sold

As if these discounts are not enough, Wakanow also allows you to adjust pricing on the different travel products based on your negotiations with your customers. Isn’t this amazing? Get started with Wakanow today!

Conclusion

There you have it, guys. This post has been an ultimate guide to affiliate marketing in Nigeria. From this post, you must have learned the basics of affiliate marketing, tips on how to get your affiliate marketing career in Nigeria started, and some affiliate marketing opportunities in Nigeria that you can kick-start your career with.

Be rest assured, we will continuously update this article as soon some new and highly profitable affiliate marketing programmes are unveiled in Nigeria for you to leverage on.

Which other affiliate marketing programmes have you tried asides from the programmes mentioned in this post? Share your experiences in the comment section below.

Until the next post, keep making money online!