.jpg)
Basic Guide to Affiliate Marketing
What is Affiliate Marketing?
‍
Imagine making money at any given time and from anywhere. This method called affiliate marketing, is when an affiliate earns profit for marketing another person’s or company’s products. An affiliate is an organization or someone who is partnered with a company to help sell its products or services. Affiliations can be two different companies that are subsidiaries of the same larger parent company.
‍
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
‍
There are affiliate programs that allow individuals or businesses to promote and sell products or services of a company in return for a commission on each sale. The affiliate would earn a commission every time someone makes a purchase through a referral link that is unique and associated with the affiliate’s recommendation. Commission rates for affiliate sales depend on the company and the offer. Affiliate marketing has 4 main roles:
‍
- ‍Affiliate/Publisher: this is the individual or entity that is responsible for promoting the merchant’s product or service.
- ‍Merchant: the individual or entity that is selling the product or service that the affiliate is promoting.
- ‍Affiliate Network: the link between the affiliate and a merchant’s affiliate program. While affiliates and merchants can still connect without an affiliate network, having an affiliate network is pretty common for business relationships.
- ‍Customer: The individual who purchases a product or service through an affiliate. Merchants collaborate with affiliates to connect with the affiliate’s audience and turn them into customers.
‍
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
‍
- Less Responsibilities: you would just simply be involved in handling the digital marketing side of building and selling a product, as you do not have to worry about more difficult tasks such as developing, supporting, or fulfilling an order.
- Low risk: it is free to join an affiliate program. After you’ve built an audience, you can begin making money with an established affiliate product or service.
- Ability to scale: affiliate marketing can offer the potential to scale your earnings without hiring any extra assistance. You can introduce new products to your audience and build campaigns for extra products while your current work will progressively generate profit.
‍
Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing
‍
- Requires patience: the saying “money doesn’t grow on trees” applies well into affiliate marketing. It requires time and patience to grow an audience. Testing different channels can be useful to see which one will better connect with your audience. Consider researching the most relevant and trustworthy products that are worth promoting. You can spend time blogging or posting content on social media throughout your marketing channels.
- It is commission-based: pay is not based on a weekly paycheck. Affiliate marketing programs function on a commission basis, paid by either lead, click, or sale. Companies use a temporary browser cookie to track people’s actions from your content. When someone takes action like making a purchase, you receive the payout.
- There is no control over the program: there are rules to how a company runs their affiliate program and affiliates do not have any say in them. They must follow the rules and guidelines for what they say and how they present its product or service. Competitors also follow the same recommendations, which affiliates have to use their creativity skills to be different from the crowd.
‍
Useful Affiliate Marketing Strategies
‍
There is usually an advertising budget for digital marketing. According to WebFX, digital marketing costs an average of $1,000 to $7,000 for small-to-medium sized businesses. For affiliate marketing, your business can gain a lot of traction at the expense of less cost and risk, great for small businesses that do not always have enough funds for a marketing plan at times. Here are 5 affiliate marketing strategies that can be useful to follow:
‍
- Affiliation: word of mouth still works as a marketing tool. You want to look into potential affiliates that have an engaged following and are trustworthy. While numbers are important, consider thinking about engagement, authority, and page views to decide if the potential affiliates are a good hire. SEMRush and Hubspot are two tools that are a good starting point in becoming an affiliate.
- Optimize your Platforms: your main goal in optimizing your platforms should be focused on conversion, which is when visitors land on your page. They should be engaged enough to take action, that is if they make a purchase of a product or sign up to your newsletter. Conversion optimization ensures that a great user experience is made, increasing leads and traffic to your website.
- Expand your Affiliate Program: relying on one to two affiliates is a great start. However, this method might not be sustainable in the long run. Expanding your affiliate program is the way to maximizing your program potential as this will gain new potential audiences and form future opportunities. Do research on potential affiliates and create a relationship with them on their own platforms.
- Create Quality Content That Provides Value: a costly mistake affiliate marketers make is only creating content to just drive sales. People can see right through the sales pitch and if there is nothing that is of value, they will quickly leave and most likely never come back. Think about what you want when you’re searching online for products or topics. Try to give your readers something they can learn with, like an answer to a question they might have, informational descriptions of a product or service, or even tips that they can use to make their lives easier.
- Use Clear Call to Actions: you want to give your audience the option to buy products you are promoting and make it simple for them to do so. Clear calls to action on a website like “buy now” buttons, tables that easily show products, highlighted links, and images of the products are all good ways to use calls to action for the audience. If you create video or audio reviews, make sure to let your audience know how they can buy the products being discussed and include an affiliate link or a promotional code.
‍
What’s Next?
‍
