Beginners Guide on How to start Rakuten Affiliate Marketing

 Ho

to Start Rakuten Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing is the kind of online marketing when we get the reward or commission by selling products of different brands, companies, or people through our own links on our blogs, websites, social media accounts, or any other way online. It is also termed as performance-based marketing as the affiliates gets their commission on based of their efforts in bringing the visitors or buyers to the product or company’s website.

People trying affiliate marketing are becoming more and more in number. Some are doing it as their side hustle and some are doing it as full time. There are different kinds of affiliate platforms like digital products, or products through e-commerce like amazon. Even many businesses are looking for affiliates to promote their products. 

In this time of social media, websites, having followers in any niche can prove to be profitable. But, one thing that all the affiliate marketers must be a.ware of is that the products will sell only when you have relevant niche to promote it. 

For example, if you have a blog about digital marketing, you won’t be able to sell health & wellness products on it. While choosing your niche, you ought to keep in mind a few things- the niche should be of your interest about which you can talk and write a lot. 

Another important thing is to choose a niche that is comparatively less competitive and have a better scope of earning.

Rakuten Advertising is also an affiliate marketing service provider. It has over 20 years of experience in affiliate and performance marketing. 

Rakuten Advertising basically connects advertisers with the audiences and helps publishers monetize their content. It has a very good profitable, long term partnership between advertisers and publishers. 

It has access to around 150,000 active publishers worldwide, with a dedicated team of network development specialists who identify affiliates and partner opportunities across content, influencer, and loyalty. 

The Rakuten allows you to earn commission directly from your site each month and gain access to tools that help your site to make high profits.

The company had also claimed over being the largest pay-for-performance affiliate marketing network on the internet.  

To get into the Rakuten affiliate marketing, you first need to decide upon your niche and the target audience concerning with your niche and particular products you’re selling. 

The primary thing to make affiliate marketing work is to make a website. 

There might be people who say that it could be done well even without a website. But, that would be very difficult. Running a website makes it a lot easier and organized, authentic way to attract prospects to your products.

Next thing is to keep in mind that content is king. The content should be readable and relatable. It should be about the topics related to your niche. The site should be mobile friendly. Don’t use spun content. It will affect the quality of your content badly. Besides, the website should be user-friendly and the content or blog should be search friendly. You must handle your SEO (search engine optimization) game strongly. Remember, honesty is best policy and the people will only connect with you when they feel connected with you and find your contents unique and value adding.

So, you have to have a good user-friendly website on which navigation and other things are good. 

Promote your website and content to your target audience. Likes, comments and shares will increase the chances of your content to rank on google. Learn to how optimize the website through optimizing content, pictures.

You’ll have to first login to the Rakuten Advertising setup the account. To Login, go to Rakuten Advertising, click on login, and then to affiliate at the upper right corner. 

Next step is to enter username & password and click login. Username and password are sent at the time of registration. If any difficulty arises, you can contact to related Help Center articles or you can also contact to Customer Support for your location.

After the successful login, you have to go on to setup your account. For that you have to fill all the updated and latest information. 

The next step is to select the payment method which you should choose very carefully as it’s very important to receive to have it in place in order to receive the payment without any hassle. 

There are many options available for publisher payment depending on location.

After you’re done, you’ll have to find advertisers. You have to work with advertisers in the categories of content you already have and promote on your website. 

To start promoting advertisers on your site, you’ll have to be approved into their programs.

For this, go to publisher dashboard help center. Help center offers different ways to find advertisers programs to which you can apply to join. 

Then through publisher dashboard, you can use advertisers search box and can find specific advertisers by name.  Another way is to select PROGRAMS tab, then click New Advertisers to see the list of all the advertisers who have joined the Rakuten Advertisers Affiliate Network recently. Further, click on CATEGORIES and select a specific category to see a list of associated advertisers. 

To view an alphabetically ordered list of all the available advertiser programs, you have to click see All Advertisers at bottom right of categories list page.

 You can filter your search too according to the networks or geographic area. Selecting the advertisers will next lead you to see the summary of programs. To see the offers available, select the offers tab and available offers.

The next step is very important. That is, to apply for a program. To apply to advertiser’s program, select radio button next to the offer you want to join and click UPDATE at the bottom of page. 

There are many advertisers program available, which if you want to join, can do so by clicking APPLY at the bottom of the page.  

Here you have to agree to the terms and conditions of the advertiser. Different advertisers have different terms and conditions. 

You must read it very carefully and thoroughly. As there are so many important and hidden things can come out. You will also get a confirmation mail from the advertiser whether you’re approved or not. 

Now you have to create link. When approved, you are eligible to access their affiliate link. 

There are various link types that containing affiliate codes and other information through which you will get commissions on every sell you make through your link. 

To use any advertiser’s existing link, go to Links, then get Links in your publisher dashboard. Click on an advertiser in the list to see their details.

 From the advertiser home page, click links to see the link types they offer. After getting the link type, filter it by category to refine your results.

 From this list, select the link as per your choice and click Get Link at the far right of the page. 

Then you’ll get a pop-up with the HTML code with your tracking code included which you have to copy & paste onto your website. 

Another kind of link is deep link, which directs your site’s visitors to a specific page on an advertiser’s site rather than to the advertiser’s frame page. 

Then a deep linking tool is built into the publisher dashboard, found at Links and then to Book marklet.

Now you’ll have to go to reporting. To do that, go to Reports, and then to Reporting for Rakuten’s well-designed reports.

Sales and Activity report is one good report as it gives you an idea about what you’re generating. You can also create your own custom report as per your needs.

Now, finally comes the most interesting part of the affiliate program, i.e, commissions and payments. 

There are several factors involved in process of receiving payment for commissions earned from advertisers.

 Like, one condition you can go through is to have a minimum threshold in earning. 

This means you must have a certain sum of amount to withdraw it.

 There are different time periods to withdraw the amount too. For some it’s weekly or every Wednesday.

 However, advertisers are invoiced monthly. So, basically the timeline depends on advertisers. 

Some of them might pay you early, while some take the entire allotted time.

Rakuten had also introduced two new tools to  make it easier. These are- Automate and Curate. 

Automate is the tool which will make affiliate marketing automatic for your blog or website. 

The tool is in javascript and adding it on your blog will convert all regular link into affiliate links.

 You can access this by login into your account and then click on Portfolio > Automate.

Curate is a tool which can create the product widget and add it anywhere on your blog. However, not all the advertisers support it. 

You can use these features which can really bring drastic positive change to your website or blog, and marketing.

If done right, affiliate marketing can make you rich like no other business can. 

The good thing is you don’t have to put the whole day into it. When there are many online jobs and businesses that have become dead end, affiliate marketing is still one way which is thriving and you can make as much as you can according to hard work you put in. 

You can even pursue it as a side hustle and can do it alongside your job or regular business. 

However, Rakuten Affiliate Marketing, like any other hustle, requires patience and some time to reap the fruits for what you sow. Certainly, this is what matters the most.

Key to this Rakuten affiliate program review and you will be good to go.