Hisham Sarwar
In Pakistan, I am often asked about the best affiliate marketing websites to pick products from (سر سب سے اچھی افیلی ایٹ سائٹ کونسی ہے). With over two decades of experience in the GIG economy selling services as a freelancer, I’ve been selling affiliate products too. As a digital marketer, I’ve leveraged my online presence to sell hosting services to businesses that are looking for WordPress websites. Here’s all you need to know about affiliate marketing in Pakistan.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a great way to generate additional income. You can either become an affiliate marketer and promote other brands, or you can establish an affiliate program to promote your own brand.
Affiliate programs have high advantages. There’s low ongoing cost, low risk, flexibility, and high ROI if the product is trending and in demand.
The beauty of affiliate marketing is that it benefits both brands and creators. Brands can enjoy the benefits of trusted referrals from relevant creators and gain access to new audiences. Meanwhile, creators and affiliates can earn a commission on sales or other marketing actions that result from their efforts.
The affiliate marketing industry has a global worth of over $17 billion and is expected to grow to $27.78 billion by 2027.
Daraz Affiliate Program:
As a marketer, there are many high-paying affiliate programs. Starting from Daraz, a local eCommerce platform that ships all across Pakistan, Daraz allows marketers to sign up as an affiliate for free and use HTML codes or banners that can be used on your website. Every sale that is made through your link on the Daraz website is counted as an affiliate and a commission is paid. This stands true for every brand. Affiliates sign up for free, and they get ready to use HTML codes for their websites. When a shopper clicks on the link on the affiliate website, they are taken to the brand website. Every activity is recorded and a sale is tracked. The commissions usually vary from 2% to 40% per sale. The payment is typically made once a month to the affiliate marketers.
Amazon Associates Program:
It is widely acknowledged that Amazon is the leading company in the eCommerce industry. This multinational American technology giant specializes in eCommerce and is known for its exceptional ability to sell a wide range of products, including electronic goods like video and MP3 streaming, DVDs, CDs, games, and VHSs, as well as jewelry, toys, books, e-books, furniture, food, and more. Its expertise in this field is unparalleled, making it the preferred destination for millions of shoppers worldwide.
Amazon does not have its own operations in Pakistan, which means that you cannot purchase anything directly from Amazon as a shopper. However, people in Pakistan are still making money through Amazon’s affiliate marketing program. Amazon Associates is a popular and one of the largest affiliate programs in Pakistan and around the world that provides a good commission percentage to its affiliate marketers. The commission rates on Amazon vary depending on the category of products with the highest commission rate being 20% for Amazon Games and the lowest being 1% for Health and Personal Care. The cookie retention period on Amazon is 24 hours, which means that your cookie will expire after 24 hours.
Alibaba Affiliates:
Alibaba, founded by Jack Ma in 1999, is the biggest e-commerce company in China. Jack Ma is also known as the richest man in China. According to Forbes’ Global 2020 list, Alibaba is the most important corporation and the 31st largest public company in the world.
The Alibaba Affiliate Program offers a cost-per-sale model for promoting digital and physical wholesale trade products. Affiliates can earn up to $1,000 per sale with a single-tier commission structure and no minimum payout.
Alibaba offers an affiliate program for marketers to earn a commission of 7% on the transaction price. The company specializes in providing a broad range of services, including e-commerce, electronic payment systems, retail, shopping search engines, internet, cloud computing services, and technology products. In 2018, Alibaba became the second Asian company to surpass the $500 billion mark, following in the footsteps of its competitor Tencent.
Affiliate Marketing AliExpress:
Cracking the code of affiliate marketing with AliExpress is like finding the Rosetta Stone of e-commerce. With an extensive range of quality products and worldwide shipping, AliExpress has become a go-to platform for aspiring affiliate marketers not just in Pakistan but all over the world.
AliExpress has over 150M affiliate products to promote and pays up to a 9% commission rate.
Telemart Affiliate Program:
A pure Pakistani brand hailing from Karachi, Telemart has quickly surfaced as a viable competitor to Daraz. Telemart affiliate program allows marketers to promote thousands of product listings and earn up to 4% per sale. Their mainstream products include but are not limited to Cameras, Cosmetics, Automative, and Fashion.
Goto Affiliate Pakistan:
Goto has over 500,000 products to promote as an affiliate marketer. It’s a pure Pakistani-based e-commerce portal that promotes COD (Cash on Delivery). The portal has products ranging from Fashion to electronics and pays good commissions on sales.
Digital Tools Affiliates:
With a huge rise in technically skilled resources on the internet offering their services as freelancers in Pakistan, digital products are in high demand. Talk about WordPress, themes, and plugins or tools to promote websites such as SemRush, Ahrefs, and UberSuggest — digital products and their affiliate demand is rising. Affiliate marketers promote these digital products and make money online.
Fiverr Affiliate Program:
Freelance marketplaces are extremely popular in Pakistan. Fiverr is a freelance website that enables service providers to sell their Gigs (services) to the world. As an affiliate marketer, you can boost your earnings by promoting and driving traffic to the Fiverr platform.
Fiverr affiliate commission is different depending on the category a client makes a purchase. For FTB (First-time buyers), there is a flat $50 for services such as Industrial and Product Design, Data Science, Mobile Apps, and Website Development.
There’s a flat $40 payout if a buyer purchases services of Website Builder & CMS, Lyric and Music Videos, Data Processing, Game Development, and Website Design.
Fiverr pays $30 for E-Commerce product videos, 3d Product Animation, and SEO.
Fiverr pays $25 for Gaming, Articles and Blog Posts, Video Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Resume Writing, and Short Video Ads.
There’s a flat $15 affiliate commission for all other categories on the website.
How to sell affiliate products?
There are many ways affiliate marketers can sell products in Pakistan. Here are the three best ways to promote products. According to Authority Hacker, 78.3% of affiliate marketers use SEO as a primary traffic source.
1- Shopify:
As an affiliate marketer, you can create a Shopify store and start selling affiliate products. There are different Shopify themes to choose from. Their pricing varies but the theme is commonly used for creating dropshipping, and e-commerce stores.
Pakistan is expected to generate $8,085 million in eCommerce revenue by 2023, ranking 36th among global markets. Shopify is commonly referred to as an off-the-shelf CMS (content management system) for selling products online.
You can create a Shopify store, but it requires a monthly payment. You can set up your affiliate website and sell different brands’ products.
2- WordPress:
WordPress is another CMS website that allows you to seamlessly create a website and a blog. The Beingguru blog is created on a WordPress theme. You can create an affiliate website on WordPress that focuses on informational intent related to your product and also sell it. Usually, the balance between informational and commercial content is 90% to 10%.
This means the blog needs to focus 90% on providing information about a product and only 10% of content should focus on selling. After you’ve published your website, the best way to promote it is through Google PPC (Google Ads) for your business-related keywords.
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3- Social Media:
The third and most effective is social media. The best platforms to sell online are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Affiliate marketers prefer social media platforms as they allow them to directly push a service to a mass audience.
According to recent statistics, 75.8% of affiliate marketers use Facebook to promote affiliate products. Additionally, 61.4% of affiliate marketers use Instagram for affiliate marketing, while 42.2% use Pinterest. YouTube videos are used by 36.9% of affiliate marketers for affiliate promotions and 31.1% use Twitter. TikTok is used by 29.6% of affiliate marketers, while only 19% use LinkedIn for affiliate marketing.
