Thrifty Hustler has been online for almost two years and as I have shared in my previous posts about blogging, I spent most of my first two years learning about content creation, basic SEO, and traffic generation. I believe that at this point I have a better and clearer idea about generating traffic. I’m switching my focus now to learning how to monetize my blog. One of my ongoing experiments is learning how to monetize via affiliate marketing. In this post, I’ll be discussing how to make money on your blog with Involve Asia.
By the way, if you feel that affiliate marketing is not the monetization route that you are interested to take or if you have not started a blog yet, I suggest that you go to the following articles instead.
- How to Start a Profitable WordPress Blog
- How to Make Money with Google Adsense
- Ezoic Review – How to Make Money on your Blog with Ezoic
If you, however, are interested in complementing your Ads income, then I suggest that you continue reading. This may be something that can complement your existing monetization strategy.
Let’s start, shall we?
Photo by Jules Bss on Unsplash
What is Involve Asia?
Involve Asia is an Affiliate Marketing Company based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with a strong focus on Southeast Asia.
We are quite far behind when it comes to Affiliate Marketing compared to the US and other western countries. Thus, a lot of bloggers in this region do not have many options when it comes to monetizing their blogs via affiliate marketing. Having an affiliate marketing company focusing on the Southeast Asian market is very helpful especially for blogs like mine whose main traffic comes from the Philippines.
Sure you can sign up with affiliate marketing companies outside the Philippines such as the US and you can earn from it also, but it will only work if your traffic comes from the US as well.
How Do you Earn from Affiliate Marketing Using Your Blog?
Affiliate marketing is basically the process by which an affiliate (us, the bloggers) earns a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products. Some company has their own affiliate marketing program where you can sign up directly with them (like Amazon) and some don’t (like a lot of local companies in the Philippines – as of the time of writing).
You, as the affiliate, will have to promote the company’s products on your blog using a trackable link provided by the affiliate marketing company, and every time a reader on your blog clicks on that link and buys an item, you earn a commission.
Of course, there are more details to this but this is basically how it works.
A direct example of this is the sign-up image below. It’s linked to my Involve Asia affiliate link and if you click on that and sign up, I will earn a small commission ($1.23) at no extra cost to you. However, if you click the image but if you don’t sign up, then I will not earn a commission.
Why Sign Up with Involve Asia?
If your traffic comes primarily from Southeast Asia, in my case, the Philippines then as of the moment, Involve Asia is our best option with Affiliate Marketing. I’m guessing though that in the future, there will be similar companies that will directly compete with them and we will have more options.
How to Sign Up with Involve Asia?
Signing up is pretty simple and straightforward. All you have to do is to go to Involve Asia and fill in the required information.
All the questions are pretty much self-explanatory, however, there are certain parts where I was a little confused, and to help you with it, here are some tips from Involve Asia:
How till you earn money from Affiliate Marketing? They recommend choosing Pay Per Lead if you’re unsure of what to pick.
Traffic Acquisition Method: For bloggers and Influencers, choose Lead Generation
Advertisement Format:
According to their website:
If you are a blogger, we suggest you choose between Text links, Product sponsorship, and Homepage Banner.
Product sponsorship, YouTube Channel, Facebook Page & Twitter Post are suitable for an Influencer and Content Creator.
Once you’re done, click on the ‘I agree to the Terms & Condition’ box and then click on ‘Submit’.
Once you have submitted the form, it will take 2 -3 business days for them to review and approve your account.
You will receive an email afterward from an Account Manager once approved and you can then proceed on applying for Advertisers.
Involve Asia Membership Programme
Involve Asia has four levels of membership. Since I’m a new member, my membership is of course at the entry level.
The 4 Publisher Membership levels are:
- Silver
- Gold
- Platinum
- Black
You’ll move up the ranks by either:
- Earning more Affiliate commissions (Payout Earnings).
- Getting more membership points.
Each Membership has its own set of benefits. I think this is their way of encouraging publishers like us to generate more sales through our affiliate links. You can see here the benefits per membership level.
What’s Next?
After you get approval, you will then have to apply individually to advertisers and again, they will review your blog and will reject or approved it. Initially, I thought that once I get approved by Involve Asia, I will just get the link and put it on my website.
There are certain companies though that don’t have an additional approval process such as Involve Asia themselves and Hostinger PH. Luckily, Hostinger is also my WebHost! 🙂
How to Find a Company to Promote
Once you have an approved account with Involve Asia, all you have to do is to apply to advertisers so you can start promoting them. Here’s how you find a company to promote on your blog:
After you log in, click on “Partners‘ and then click on ‘Advertiser Directory‘. You can see this on the upper left side of your Involve Asia screen.
What I did was filtered the list of Advertisers based on country. In my case, I chose the Philippines. Click on ‘Search‘ after choosing your country.
The next screen will show you all companies that can be promoted for Philippine-based bloggers.
Once you have chosen the company that you want to promote on your blog, click on ‘Apply’. A pop-up will appear and you have to fill in the needed information.
Click on ‘Save‘ and wait for the approval or rejection You will get an email regarding the status of your application or you can check the status on your ‘My Advertisers‘ page.
As you can see on my own ‘My Advertisers‘ page, I got approved for some and got rejected by two companies I’m interested in promoting. The reason for the rejection was not specified and I’m guessing it might be due to relevancy, and possibly blog traffic (I’m not really sure).
How to Add Involve Asia Affiliate Links to Your Blog Post
Let’s say you wrote a review article about the latest Poco phone which is the Poco X3 and you want to add your Shopee affiliate link (assuming that you are already approved by Shopee in your Involve Asia account), all you have to do is:
1. Inside your ‘My Advertisers‘ page, click on Shopee, and then when the Involve Asia – Shopee page opens, click on ‘Promote‘
A pop-up box will appear on your screen. Choose your ‘Property’, if you only listed one website on your Involve Asia account then it will auto-populate. And then search Shopee for the relevant page and then copy and paste the link from Shopee to the pop-up box in your Involve Asia account.
Tip: To ensure that the products I’m linking are from the legit store, I only get the links from the respective brand’s store inside Shopee Mall.
Once you have generated your affiliate link, hyperlinked that to your target keyword on your post. Here’s an example:
Remember the link that we generated for Poco X3, I hyperlinked it on this post so I can show you how it’s done. All you have to do is highlight the word/phrases that you want to hyperlink and then click on the chain symbol on your WordPress Editor and then paste the link and hit ‘Enter’. And that’s it, your affiliate link is now in your blog post.
How Much Can You Earn from Involve Asia?
The commission varies depending on the advertisers, and of course, it’s subject to change. You can always check the commission structure when you go to the company’s page inside Involve Asia website.
There are different ways to earn on Involve Asia. Some of those ways include but not limited to:
Cost Per Sale (CPS): CPS means, a sale is confirmed when a purchase is successfully made, with no cancellation or refund. These transactions are normally processed by credit cards or online banking. This model is commonly associated with item purchasing offers.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA): For CPA, advertisers only pay affiliates for actions resulted according to what is set out in their program terms.
Cost per Lead (CPL): A lead occurs when someone fills a form in which contact details are provided to the offer’s owner. An example of this is credit card applications. However, as of the time of writing, there are no affiliated credit card companies available to the Philippine market.
Cost Per Install (CPI): Publisher will be paid a fixed rate when the user installs or downloads an app or software.
How Do You Get Paid?
You can get paid via Paypal or via Bank Transfer once you reach the payment threshold amounting to RM80 (Malaysian Ringgit).
You have 2 withdrawal options:
- PayPal (Unlimited withdrawal but with a processing fee of RM 4 or 2%, whichever is higher)
- Bank transfer (Processing fee applies for International bank transfers)
Once you have submitted a payment request, you will receive your payment within 10 working days.
Please note though that even if releasing of payment takes 10 working days, validation and payment from the advertisers takes a bit longer.
For example, with Lazada, the validation period is 45 days of the following month, and then the payment will take place 30 days after the validation period which makes it a total of 75 days. For Shopee it’s even way longer. Their validation and payment period takes 135 days. And then on top of that, you will also have to wait a few more days once you have submitted a payment request (releasing of payment to you from Involve Asia).
This is due to the fact that consumer products bought online are subject to returns, so they have to factor in this timeline to ensure the accuracy of their payouts. I hope that this timeline improves in the future because this is quite a long waiting time for publishers.
How to Generate A Decent Earning from Affiliate Marketing
So far, I have earned a little money from being with Involve Asia for less than a month (someone clicked and bought some items using my Shopee and Lazada links – thank you!!!). And although it’s a very small amount of money, it gave me an idea of how this works.
To be fair, I don’t have that many affiliate links from them on this blog, and as I’ve said earlier, the links have also been in my blog for less than a month. Most of my articles (as of the time of writing) are about personal finance and not much about consumer products.
And since I’m experimenting with blog monetization, signing up with Involve Asia helped me understand how to make money from affiliate marketing.
Here are some tips on how you can generate a decent earning from affiliate marketing with Involve Asia.
Create Relevant Posts
If you are a lifestyle blog then this is perfect for you. This will definitely complement the income that you are getting from your advertising network
Lifestyle blogs tend to cover a variety of topics including consumer product and service reviews. The people that read lifestyle blogs, most especially review articles are ready to buy and pay for products and services. They are reading blog reviews because basically, they are in the process of choosing which products to buy.
Drive Traffic
The more blog traffic you have, the more chances of getting readers who are ready to buy the products that you are promoting on your blog posts. You can generate traffic by:
- Writing SEO-optimized articles
- Promoting your blog in various social media
- Promoting your blog on other websites such as guest posting on other blogs
- Promoting your blog in other online media such as Youtube, TikTok, etc
- Engaging your social media and blog followers
Create a More Targeted Blog
This is my key takeaway from trying Involve Asia. I think there’s a lot of earning potential with them only if my blog is more targeted towards the advertisers that they have.
If they have more financial advertisers, I think I would have earned more even if I’ve only been with them for a short time. I hope that they onboard more finance-related companies soon so personal finance blogs like me can have a chance to promote financial products too.
Every time I check my Google Analytics, it drives me nuts seeing the hundreds of clicks my blog generates to banks and other related companies on a weekly basis and I don’t even earn a single cent from them because most of them are not affiliate links.
Create Honest and Detailed Reviews
SEO and other forms of online promotions will surely help drive new readers to your blog. However, creating loyal followers to your blog is a different story.
To ensure that people go back to your blog, especially if your blog is about product reviews, then creating honest and detailed reviews will help you retain your readers for a looong time!
Related Posts:
Final Thoughts
If you are a lifestyle or fashion blogger or if you frequently write about a variety of consumer products and services on your blog then you should sign up with Involve Asia so you can complement your ads earnings.
In my case, this gave me an idea to build a more targeted blog in the future that is more fit for affiliate marketing.
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