Affiliate Marketing, in the easiest way of explaining it, is referring people to a product or service in exchange for a commission.
There are affiliate marketplaces where you may find businesses that offer programs.
Businesses may have an in-house program to manage and conduct affiliate marketing. There is also big eCommerce sites such as Amazon, Ebay, and Buy.com which will give you a cut of the sale if a person goes through your link and purchases from their platform.
You might be thinking: “But why would I want to send User to competitors?”
Yes, that’s a valid question because it means you’re making a sale on your product or service but consider what happens if they don’t complete a transaction anyway… you wouldn’t have made money from them but at least with affiliate marketing you can earn a bit.
Here are my suggestions on how you can integrate affiliate marketing into your business:
1. In place of upsells, cross sells, and related products
Your business may only have a few products or services to which it offers the industry. Affiliate marketing allows you to add the opportunity to generate additional income through upsells, cross sells, and the display of related products.
Consider what products complement yours; these can be found on affiliate marketplaces/platforms and then displayed after the checkout process or part of a social/email marketing campaign directed at those that are your customers.
2. Combine it with online & content marketing
If you follow Neil Patel’s online marketing step-by-step guide, which covers the basics of the main marketing channels and lets you work around a real-world case study, you will see that you’ll reach a point where content marketing is a significant return on investment. Guides like these really dig into what makes for great content marketing that naturally leads to online sales; combine it with the other marketing tactics and the content becomes the vehicle for sales. Great content gets your brand found, allows you to promote products/services, and educate your community.
The addition of affiliate marketing to the mix allows you to touch on topics that your community finds interesting and offers them actual products or services linked throughout the work. Of course these links are affiliated. Your business still provides a great offer but you’re also showing them additional options that complement their purchase.
3. Implement an affiliate marketing program
If you don’t want to do the affiliate side of things you’re more than welcome to implement an affiliate program for your business. When you introduce an affiliate program you give marketers (and customers) the ability to promote your products in exchange for a cut (as explained) but what makes it especially rewarding is that they are the ones doing the heavy lifting.
A handful of power affiliates that get on board with your program has the potential to send you hundreds (potentially thousands) of new leads each month.
You will need to find an affiliate program service or marketplace that works for your business and create assets for your affiliates to aid in promotion (such as email copy, creative, sales letters, and the like) but if you can put in the effort it’s certainly worth the reward.
4. Use it for testing new ideas
What if:
- You wanted to explore a new business venture?
- You wanted to see if a new product might fit your current business?
In any other situation it would mean that you’d be spending money on the testing and time on the research & development. With affiliate marketing you can do this testing and earn some of that money back.
Example: You want to explore a business opportunity that’s somewhat close to what you do now. You setup the basic site and populate it with affiliated products. You run ad campaigns and track the results. If there is a positive return on your investment then it’s telling you that the opportunity may well be worth pursuing (and in the meantime you’re recouping those advertising costs through the commissions you’re making off the affiliate sales).
Affiliate marketing is quite easy to get into since you’re already operating a business – it’s merely doing sales but for other people’s products. You can see that there are plenty of ways to integrate it into your business to boost your earnings so why not give it a shot?
Author bio. :- Priya is a Technical SEO at Hopinfirst, a leading mobile app development company which provide best ios app development and Android app development Services.
