In simple words, Affiliate Marketing is a system of referring customers to a business and earning a commission for it. The sales are tracked via affiliate links from one website to another. The benefit of online affiliate marketing is easy to track,More transparent & is faster. For business with the latest tech & plugins it is easy to track referral links & keep track of all the affiliates.
In the Online world, a Manufacturer can set up a E-commerce store & have affiliates promote their links directly to end customers. Since they are cutting out the middle men customer gets cheaper prices and Affiliates can have huge Bonuses. This is another advantage of online affiliate marketing system.
The Benefits Of Online Affiliate Marketing
The Affiliate marketing industry & the Eco-System are very Mature now. Because of this manufactures are able to setup Affiliate marketing easily. This means the Affiliate marketing has boomed from past few years. There is a huge industry for Affiliate marketing both in the terms as business and a Marketer. Anyone can take part in Affiliate marketing, There is no age restrictions and Education qualifications to be an Affiliate marketer. What matters is how are you getting the traffic and building the strategy for conversions through your Affiliate marketing links.
The biggest headache of any business is getting their targeted audience, in the right platform and at the right time. With the help of Content creators and Affiliate marketers business can reach out to the targeted audience very easily. Content creators have a dedicated niche, either Fashion, Food, Technology etc. Business can reach out to the right content creators or the Affiliate marketers who matches with their niche. The content creators audience will be based on their niche & hence the business can target niche Affiliate marketers for selling their Products. For example a Fashion brand can reach out to Content creators who are into the niche of Fashion.
THE DEMAND/INTEREST FOR AFFILIATE MARKETING (TRENDS)
I have gathered the above data from GOOGLE TRENDS. Over period of time you can make out that Affiliate Marketing has been on demand (Interest) in the search engine when compared to Paid Ads. The Affiliate marketing in US alone will be $8.2 billion by 2022. (Predicted)
There is a lot more transparency with online affiliate marketing because the commissions are easily tracked. This makes people feel secure about investing money & effort. With the affiliate dashboard both the marketer & the Business can easily track all the referrals and link made at one place.
Online Affiliate marketing is International. You can promote US products to US customers from india or any other country your in. You can even start promoting with free Organic methods like Content writing etc. Content creators can make more revenue with their visitors through Affiliate promotion than with Display Ads.
Interesting Stats On Affiliate Marketing Worldwide
81% of Advertisers & 84% of content publishers in the US make use of Affiliate marketing as one of their revenue generation sources. Advertisers depend on Affiliates not just for the product sales but also to build Brand Awareness. Amazon associates has 10,00,000 Affiliates on it’s platform. Share a Sale has more than 7 lakhs Affiliate on its Platform.
83% of Online shoppers check for reviews before making an online purchase. This is a great opportunity for content publishers to get traffic that is in the buying stage. This is a very good platform for content creators, the customers tend to do more Re-search before they get into the Buying stage. Having a blog related to the reviews of the product can be a great strategy for Affiliate marketing.
More than 80% of the Affiliate marketers are focused on promoting B2C Products & Services. Content marketing & blogging is responsible for more than 40% of the Affiliate sales generated.
How Dose Affiliate Marketing Work
As we know Affiliate Marketing is all about promotion. But it involves Content creation, Product creation, Marketing strategy & more. To leverage all these there are mainly 3 persons involved.
- Seller or Product Creators
- The Affiliate or the Advertiser
- The Consumer
Seller/Product Creator – The seller can be a single entrepreneur or a team. They are Vendor, Merchant or the product creator. The product can be Physical object like House, Cars,Fashion products etc.It can also be a software related product like Automated tools, Plugins etc. They may not be totally involved in advertising, but as a brand they may also advertise & profit sharing with Affiliate marketer & Influencers.
The Affiliate or the Publisher- the affiliate can be either an individual or a company that markets the seller’s product in an appealing way to potential consumers. If the consumer does end up buying the product, the affiliate receives a portion of the revenue made. Every Affiliate have their own Targeted audience, This creates a Niche. This helps the affiliate attract consumers who will be most likely to act on the promotion.
The Consumer – They are the Drivers of Affiliate Marketing. Affiliates share these products with them on social media, blogs, and websites. Affiliate’s share of the profit is included in the retail price. The consumer will complete the purchase process and receive the product as normal, unaffected by the affiliate marketing system in which they are a significant part.
Why Business Should Prefer Affiliate Marketing.
Every business need traffic, Leads & Sales . Internal marketing teams in an agency are very inefficient in achieving their goals because there are so many different sources of traffic out there & the marketing team cannot tap into all channels. Handling 5 to 8 clients will not give the marketer to check each section of the clients marketing channel. I have personally experienced this when i was working for many marketing agency’s. it is very important for a marketer to have experience in a single subject rather than having knowledge in all marketing platforms.
Different Affiliates will tap into different channels based on the niche and this gives a wide net to be a cast on the market for the business. The Affiliate links will reach places that the marketing team can never reach. Eg- Some Affiliates may be Facebook experts, Some may be in Quora & Some may be in Instagram. The business can tap into these type of Affiliates who have expertise in one Platform.
Business are paying for only Performance. They don’t need to pay for an Affiliate who sign’s up but dosen’t bring in the Leads. However they have to fire a weak marketer in the team.
Affiliate Networks have made it very easy for the business to get up and running with an Affiliate marketing system. If an Affiliate is found to be Violating the terms and conditions like using brand Keywords & Spamming the links, They can be kicked out of. the system with just a click of a button. There is no need to fire them like a typical full time employee. When sales go down, Even the marketing costs goes down as the business is only paying for performance.
It is very important that we treat Affiliate Marketing as an investment rather than a Job. We are investing time, Money & Energy. An investor dosen’t expect all his investment to produce returns. Similarly, All you of content marketing may not produce good results.
Affiliate Marketing also helps us in understanding our target market. This will help you launch your own products and service in the future in the same niche.
Top Affiliate Marketing Models (The Workflow)
CPC- Cost Per Click (Pay Per Click) – The Advertiser pays you for every click. This method has become to common now and it is very likely because of lack of performance tracking.
CPL – Cost PerLead (Pay Per Lead)- the advertiser pays you for every lead that you generate.
CPI- Cost Per Install (Pay Per Install) – You get a commission whenever you get the Advertisers app installed.
CPA/CPS – Cost Per Action/Sale (Pay Per Sake) – The advertiser pays you every time when a sale happens that generates revenue for the advertiser.
Tools Required For Affiliate Marketing
Community Tools – Facebook groups, Telegram groups (Always start with a community which you have built ). So that they already know who you are & they can trust you enough to buy products from you.
Keyword Research Tools SEM Rush / AHREF
Link shortening and tracking tools to make your affiliate link look good and trustworthy while promoting (Bitlink Etc)
A WordPress blog. This is highly recommended because everything starts from a website. Choose a niche and to get started with the content creation. Content creation tools for you to come up with content.
Writing reviews of the product is the best way to generate Affiliate sales. (Because you are leveraging the branding done by the merchant, And you are just intercepting the customer before the purchase is made). Most importantly you are getting people at the buying stage.
The three major types of content for Affiliate Marketing are Top 10 Posts, Review post & Product Comparison post.
You can make use of Google Autosuggest to find out the Alternative for each product.
To learn more about how to promote your Product on Facebook Ads CLICK HERE.