Affiliate marketing is a mystery and, when you look into searches on the subject, you’ll see that people are wondering whether or not they can make money from it. This is simply another marketing tool that you can use to optimize and grow your business.
Affiliate marketing – what is it?
According to Wikipedia, Affiliate marketing is “a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.”
Affiliates, though not employees at all, are kind of like an extension to your marketing team. They don’t get a salary, and they get paid for every new sale or lead that they generate with their efforts. This is not the same as referral marketing, though. Referrers know people personally whereas affiliates don’t.
How does Affiliate Marketing work?
If you want to increase your audience, you need affiliates. There are different ways of organizing this. Some affiliate programs pay a commission whenever a visitor enters their contact details. Other affiliate programs wait until people make purchases before they spend their affiliates.
What do affiliates look like?
According to the Affiliate Marketing Benchmark Report in 2015. A significant majority of affiliates are male (56%), and the most common age is between 35 and 44 years old. Just over 1/3 have a 4-year degree and almost a quarter have a Master’s qualification, which means that the majority of affiliates are well educated.
Optimizing your program for Affiliate Marketing
You need to focus on the following two items:
- How good the traffic is that your affiliates send in your direction
- How many of your leads convert into sales.
- To optimize your program, you should:
- Analyze your data with care
- Ask yourself if you know a new customer’s value
- Ask yourself if you see a repeat customer’s value
- Be aware of your profit margins for every sale type
Choosing your affiliates
Good affiliates are in high demand. Almost 60% of affiliates are sticking to between one and ten different programs at once. Recruiting is both time-consuming and challenging, but it is worth doing it correctly. Here are some ideas on how to choose a decent affiliate:
- Find out their experience in your industry
- See what offers they are currently promoting
- Find out the demographics they’ve worked with
- Look at the sites that they run
- Look at the methods they use.
Problems that you could encounter with your affiliates and how to counteract them
The affiliate is not promoting or selling after a few months.
Give them more commission for a short time or offer them a bonus when they reach a milestone point.
The affiliates are old ones but have no activity
Give them updates about new products as well as seasonal events and offers. You could try being upfront and asking them what they’ve been up to and why they’ve not been promoting your business.
Affiliates have become inactive
Try to rebuild your existing relationship and look at what you used to do when they were successful.
Bonuses and Rewards
You don’t have to reserve these for lax affiliates. On the contrary, depending on your margins, you could offer your affiliates rewards and bonus as an incentive to keep promoting the business.
Which affiliate methods are the most popular?
There are loads of ways in which affiliates generate traffic. Let’s take a look:
-
- SEO (two thirds)
- Social media 60%
- Blogs (57%)
- Emails (38%)
- PPC (29%)
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Affiliates are a great marketing tool that can help drive traffic to your site and boost sales. Here are some final tips on how to make the best affiliate program:
- Get quality traffic from your affiliates
- Analyze your data so that you can measure success and reward accordingly
- Recruit the right affiliates from the start
- Have an awareness of the methods used most often by your affiliates. Restrict these to your brand, if you need o.
- Test your landing pages frequently!
