Affiliate marketing has become popular with many companies because it drives sales and creates revenue. Besides this, it’s a cost-effective marketing tactic that helps you to find leads. It has proven that with a proper strategy, you can make a lot of income from affiliate marketing.
While anyone can do it, it requires hard work and commitment. You need to be patient, persistent, and passion for knowledge combined with the right strategies and tactics.
Google Trends data indicates that there has been an increase in searches for affiliate marketing over the previous five years. Brands and affiliates have contributed to this increase in searches because it attracts customers’ attention.
The studies have shown that 81% of brands utilize affiliate marketing to engage with their customers, create more sales, and get potential customers’ attention.
Affiliate marketing is expected to have an annual growth rate of about 10% and generate more than $6.82 billion of revenue by 2020.
These statistics should be a wake-up call for brands to begin thinking of creating a profitable affiliate marketing strategy. This post will discuss the strategies you can formulate and implement to help your brand grow.
What is affiliate marketing?
It’s important to look at the aspects of affiliate marketing before discussing their strategies. Affiliate marketing is considered as performance-based marketing. Affiliates and brands work together to promote either services or products.
Affiliates receive a commission from brands after making a sale. However, this commission varies depending on the brand. Networks will pay a higher or a lower commission depending on many factors.
Affiliate marketing relies on the power of influence for your brand to get known by the audience. This is the best way for your marketing initiatives to have a lot of leads and conversions. However, you need to have a proper strategy for your brand to generate a significant amount of revenue. Let’s cover the most effective marketing strategies suitable for various brands.
Find the audience
To have a successful affiliate marketing program, you need to choose a proper audience for your brand. There is no sense in dealing with people who are not interested in your brand because you will fail to generate enough revenue.
You need to do research and find out how competing brands and products are attracting consumers. The information will help you to select a particular audience that is profitable.
Most of the customers are usually interested in wealth and money, health and fitness, and romance. People are purchasing services or products that relate to their values. It means they are willing to spend their money on things that they need. Therefore, you can promote your brand by focusing on the audience that shows particular interest in it.
Find the right affiliate
Affiliate marketing programs use the power of influence to attract people to a particular brand. If the customers show interest in the product, they will purchase it. Therefore, you will have to get a person who has enough audience who trusts them. The person should be capable to change the behavior of the customers. Here are a few things you need to consider before choosing an affiliate:
- Make sure the affiliate has enough audience that trusts them.
- Find out if the affiliate’s audience might be interested in your brand or products.
- Determine if the affiliate’s site has a good ranking, engagement, views, and authority.
It’s crucial to find out all the above aspects of the affiliate to ensure that your efforts are successful. For example, if you are in the tourism industry, choosing wealth and money sites wouldn’t be a good idea.
In the same way, you can choose a blogger who only gets 5 visitors a day because you will not have enough sales. Therefore, choose affiliates that offer something related to your products and they have enough audience.
You can do blogging yourself as well. It will require a great deal of time and effort from your side but you have to be prepared for it. If you are in a job, you have to set your priorities related to the business well in advance. If you are a student entrepreneur, you have to look out for ways that can free you up from college or university work.
For example, you can look for online assignment writing help from academic writing services. For native college work, thesis and dissertation you can hire writers from that particular country. For example, assignment writers Australia is a great way to get writing work done for Aussie students.
Promote your products
Offering special deals, coupons, and promotions work well for affiliate marketing as it increases sales. Coupons provide a chance for the consumer to make some savings. With the tough economic environment, people welcome an opportunity to get the products they need at an affordable price.
It’s for this reason why most consumers look for discount vouchers on different deals and coupon websites before they make the final decision to purchase. There are several deals and coupon sites that attract consumers with the significant discounts they offer from time to time.
Offers.com and Groupon are good examples of these websites as they get a lot of traffic. Competitive markets are suitable for coupons and if your product is in the category of beauty products, food, gadgets, or travel, then consider using such sites.
The challenge is to find a reasonable discount that will not affect your profit margins. A too high discount has a threat of reducing your profit margins, meaning the affiliate marketing initiative can become a failure. Therefore, you have to work with high-quality websites to get the most out of the coupon affiliate marketing strategy.
Find out the origin of their traffic by determining if they rely on their base of visitors or they are as a result of search traffic. You should also check the legitimacy of the site and try the coupon affiliate strategy on a few selected brands.
Use influencers
Influencers have become an important part of affiliate marketing and brands are collaborating with them because they get customers. Most brands have tested this strategy and the results have been effective.
Therefore, these brands work with multiple bloggers and social influencers, who have specialized niches. The good part about influencers is the fact that they have close relationships with their followers, making it easy for the brands.
The influencers can persuade their followers to like your brand and purchase your products or services. However, influencers don’t send more traffic than coupon sites. The main benefit is that it’s targeted traffic, making it easier to purchase your products or services. If you want to increase your conversion rates, then consider utilizing influencers.
Most influencers look for a monetary reward for their services while others might work for free or they expect to get a part of each sale you make. The renowned retailer Nordstrom used influencers by giving them their products.
Influencers for Nordstrom managed to showcase these products in their social media posts and blogs. As a result of this, the retailer attracted about 500,000 potential clients and made sales using a low budget strategy.
For effective results, the influencers have to be aligned with your brand. Make sure that the influencer has a good reach, engagement, and check the demographics of the audience. You should also monitor the growth of the sales over some time so that you can decide if the strategy is working as expected or not.
Create a strong affiliate network
Traditional marketing thrives by building your network and affiliate marketing is not different. However, you will have to create your affiliate network instead of getting into various affiliate networks. It becomes easier to grow the network once you have created them. With a clear approach, most affiliates will see the benefits of joining your network.
You need to tell potential affiliates how your affiliate program works, the commission you are ready to pay, and all the necessary information.
Let your network grow by allowing your affiliates to incorporate sub-affiliates. You can promote this by offering a small commission of the sales made by the sub-affiliates. For best results, it all comes to encouraging and motivating your loyal affiliates. Make sure you appreciate the work be done by affiliates by rewarding them.
To see how the affiliates are doing, monitor their performance and assess the lifetime value of the clients they bring to you. If you are convinced that they are doing remarkable work, consider increasing the commission in the future.
Other rewards can come in the form of offering the affiliates to purchase any of your products at a discounted price. One of the successful online affiliate programs is probably Amazon Associates. The network has more than 900,000 affiliates responsible for promoting various products found on their e-commerce website.
Use multiple sources
Profitable affiliate marketing strategies utilize various sources to reach out to their audiences. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket because if it doesn’t work out as expected, you are bound to fail.
For example, instead of using only Facebook influencers or coupon websites, find other sources you can utilize to reach out to your audience. You can use different sources to determine how the audience responds well and is easiest to target. Here are some sources you can consider:
- If you have a large list of email subscribers, try email marketing.
- Product review blogs can assist you to promote your products. Customers who visit these blogs are interested in the products, meaning you stand a better chance of making conversions.
- Some professionals conduct webinars on various topics related to your niche market. The audience has trust in those experts and they will take in their recommendations to purchase your products.
- Popular YouTube videos featuring your products and are uploaded by a famous YouTuber can drive sales. YouTubers understand their audience and will help to attract potential customers to your products
Regardless of the channel, you have to assess the platform to understand an ideal one that engages your audience. One thing that every expert agrees on is that using multiple platforms provides you with the best outcomes for your affiliate marketing strategy. You should protect yourself at all times by diversifying.
If something goes wrong with one source, you have the opportunity of using the other sources. The bottom line is that this is your business, and there is nothing to prevent you from promoting your products using various sources.
Optimize your strategy and don’t give up
Affiliate marketing is not for the faint-hearted because many people easily give up once they don’t see the expected results. Therefore, it’s necessary to set up realistic goals and targets from the onset and monitor the statistics to determine what is working and what is not.
You should adjust your strategy wherever necessary. While some brands implement affiliate marketing strategies and expect instant sales, this can have bad results. Affiliates can drive traffic to your product pages, but it’s your responsibility to ensure that consumers purchase your products once they are there.
You can generate significant sales if you create an unforgettable customer experience. For you to optimize your product pages, do the following:
- Your website should load fast so that visitors don’t get frustrated and look for another site to check for alternative products.
- Provide sufficient information about your products to help your visitors make their purchasing decisions.
- Use engaging photos of your products. The photos should be of high-quality to catch the attention of potential customers.
- The product descriptions must be clear and up to a point. They should tell visitors why they need to purchase your product.
- Build trust with your visitors by featuring customer reviews.
You should look at your site as a resource for your customers. By taking time to understand your products you are offering and the audience you are targeting, it can help you optimize your site. You can develop content for your site to engage your customers.
This leads to trust, and visitors who look at your website as credible will likely purchase your products. Optimizing your product pages will increase conversion rates and will help you to retain the customers. Importantly, you can also use it upsell and cross-sell your products.
Conclusion
When you think about how to create a profitable affiliate marketing strategy, finding the right affiliate, audience, and influencers should always be on top of your mind. Then you need to promote your products, have a strong affiliate network, use a variety of sources, and optimize your website.
It’s only after doing these that you can see progress in your affiliate marketing strategy. Affiliate marketing is the right way to go if you want to attract customers and get sales for your products. Although it might take a while before the strategy is successful, with persistence, you are going to achieve your goals.
About the Author
Susan Saurel is a passionate writer from Texas. Teacher of higher category, PM in Writix, loving mom, a persistent traveler, contributing to essay pro reviews. Susan is ready to share her experience with her readers, and she has something to say, for sure.
