What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a modern interpretation of a very old idea — getting a commission on a sale.

You introduce your readers to products or services from trusted companies or individuals and get a commission on any sales from customers you send their way.

Affiliate Marketing is fast becoming an area of expertise within the digital framework.

As it becomes better understood, the impact and value that an affiliate program provides within the overall digital marketing mix are becoming clear.

Affiliates are not just an acquisition channel, but an extension of your entire marketing function.

Why should you learn Affiliate Marketing?

From SEO to branding, affiliates play an important role in allowing you to optimize your marketing strategy and reduce your costs. This is definitely one of the most exciting digital sectors to dive into, especially as Covid has impacted the way digital engages audiences online. Let’s take a closer look at what keeps driving affiliate marketing forward as a popular digital medium.

Important terminologies for Affiliate Marketing ?

Affiliate- A person who promotes the merchant's product and earns a commission is called an Affiliate or publisher.

Affiliate Link- A trackable link which is provided to an affiliate that identifies the source of the traffic to the vendor's website. This link is provided by the merchant or vendor.

An Affiliate Network- It is a marketplace where vendors list their products and affiliates find it to promote it. Some of the famous Affiliate networks are Clickbank, JVZoo, and warrior forum.

Affiliate Program- A program set up by vendors to pay commissions to their Affiliates when they refer their product to the people.

Commission- A percentage of the total sale that is paid to the affiliate for referring the sale.

It varies from 5% to 50% depending upon the industry.

Referral- Credit for a click or a sale that occurs when the affiliate sends traffic to the vendor’s site.

Is Affiliate marketing right for you or your business?

Anyone can become an Affiliate if you have an interest or dedicated passion for it.

If you are the business owner Affiliate Marketing is a good choice for you as you do not need to create an audience and your affiliate can do it for you, you will get the ready-made audience of Affiliate and the Audience is also targeted which is very good your business.

Five Super Simple steps to do Affiliate Marketing?

STEP 1: CREATE YOUR AUDIENCE PERSONA AND IDENTIFY WHAT YOUR AUDIENCE IS ALREADY PURCHASING.

Download our free guide on how to grate the Audience persona.

STEP 2: CHOOSE A PRODUCT TO PROMOTE AS AN AFFILIATE

You have three option

1. Promote the product you already love or know
2. Promote the product which has a higher commission
3. Promote the product which your Audience loves.

According to me, option 1 and 3 are great.

STEP 3: GET YOURSELF SET UP AS AN AFFILIATE

Whether you work directly with a merchant or through a network, you’ll have to apply, be approved, and provide certain information so that you can be paid.

At a minimum you’ll need to provide:

1. Your personal/business contact information for tax and reporting purposes
2. Your bank account where commissions will be sent.

In turn, the merchant must provide you with:

An affiliate link. Whenever you post about the product, you’ll use this trackable link. It will have a long tag at the end of each link that includes your affiliate ID.

You’ll also usually get some tips and useful assets for marketing the product (often found in a welcome guide or on the affiliate reporting site).

STEP 4: START PROMOTING THE PRODUCT

Your hard work and your strategy will determine your success in Affiliate Marketing

Here are some tips which you can follow while promoting the product.

1. Create your landing page
2. Create a resource page in your Blog.
3. Create and promote custom content.
4. Craft promotional Emails for your subscribers.
5. Run Exclusive live events.

STEP 5: COMPLY WITH LEGAL REQUIREMENTS (AND BEST PRACTICES)

In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires that you let people know you’ll earn a commission.

5 reasons why Affiliate Marketing has a bright future?

1. Affiliate marketing optimizes data lead strategies.

Affiliate marketing tracking solutions offer digital marketers a depth of customer data and user behaviors from a variety of traffic sources. The fact that the affiliate channel is so well tracked offers marketers the opportunity to get the best results across a breadth of their digital activities.

You are able to look at the multiple sources of traffic your affiliates generate and determine where best to spend your own budget to target more and augment their delivery.

All affiliates and managers need to have a good grasp of their data to know where changes need to be made to hunt down that next goal and major milestone.

2. What other channels can provide flexible and market reactive pricing?

The right affiliate program will be agile and able to adapt to commercials as needed.

They are often set up to react to market forces, changes in behavior, or pricing models for traffic, which is something easily done in an affiliate program compared with other advertising or paid media channels where contracts and spaces are booked months in advance.

3. Affiliate marketing remains a key driver for users and customer acquisition

No matter how the industry might change, there is no denying that affiliate marketing has remained a key driver for customer acquisition.

It is thought that some 20% of marketers in a recent survey from Forrester Research delivered by PepperJam still rank affiliate marketing as the highest customer acquisition channel within the overall marketing mix one could draw on.

In the same survey, 33% of marketers also believed that affiliate marketing programs were highly successful when it came to driving customer acquisition efforts, with a further 42% classing them as successful.

4. Affiliate marketing plays a role at every stage in the customer’s buyer awareness journey

Affiliates provide services and content that stimulates buyers to purchase at each stage of the awareness cycle prior to purchase.

They have built their brands around popular niches and search terms, and can add value to your business in every stage of the buyer journey – if you let them in!

5. Affiliate marketing is a popular alternative to paid media sources

Many countries or sectors have some stringent regulations and guidelines in place when working with affiliates. Strategically, these need to be taken into account. However, this can also lead to an awful lot of misunderstanding and mismanagement on the part of affiliate marketing managers, which in turn gives affiliates a bad rep. Poorly maintained or managed affiliate marketing programs will, in many businesses, have caused a loss.

Therefore, it is imperative that strategy is considered prior to launch an affiliate program on mass – or even in a new region where your brand might want to expand.