You’ve probably heard about Affiliate Marketing in one way or another by now. If your business is trying to reach a large group of people (especially if you own an online business), then introducing an Affiliate Marketing strategy might be a good idea.
So, What is It?
Affiliate Marketing is the process of getting other entities (people, businesses etc) to help you sell your product for a commission. For example, if you own a website that sells furniture, you can get furniture bloggers or interior design blogs to be your affiliates. They would try to send people to your site and get people to buy your products. If they were successful, you would pay them a small comission on the sale.
The more Affiliates you have, the more people your business can reach and ultimately, the more money you can potentially make.
As a business owner, you be one of two roles in an Affiliate Marketing arena. You can either be in charge of the Affiliate program, or you can be an Affiliate to another company. Being in charge means that you will be responsible to finding Affiliates and then negotiating commission deals with them. Being an Affiliate yourself means that you will need to look for owners to represent with your business.
Currently there is big money to be made online as an affiliate. According to a recent Jupiter Research study. Every year there is approximatelty 2.1 billion dollars spent on online affiliate marketing and this number is continuing to grow.
How to Improve your Affiliate Marketing Strategy
Just like any other aspect of your business, your Affiliate strategy is something that needs to be constantly maintained in order to be effective. Here are some of our tips on just how to do that:
1) Ask for their feedback
Surprisingly this is something that many people who run Affiliate programs neglect to do. The thing is, as someone who is handling Affiliates you rarely know how you are coming off or how well you are operating. In the eyes of your Affiliates
There is a strong chance that the majority of the Affiliates you are dealing with are Affiliates with other companies, or have been Affiliates for other companies in the past. Use their experience as a valuable resource when trying to determine how to do things better.
2) Make sure you aren’t fighting for the same customers
It may happen that your Affiliates have products/services of their own that clash with your target audience. In these scenarios it is important to nip the issue in the bud before it becomes bigger.
In our opinion, you have two potential ways to handle this problem. You can either go your separate ways and find another Affiliate, or you can employ an advertising strategy that you must both adhere to.
This advertisement strategy would prevent you from using the same outlets and thus collect different target audiences.
3) Keep track of your Affiliates’ success
Knowing how your Affiliates are progressing with your product or service is crucial to maintaining a good relationship. Take care of your top Affiliates by offering them incentives for good work. This will pay off in the long run as they will work harder at helping you out in the future.
Keeping tabs on your Affiliates will also help you make decisions in the future in regards to which you should keep.
4) Find your Niche
This tip is more suited to people who are trying to be affiliates to other companies instead of those who are looking to find affiliates themselves. If you want to be a good affiliate, it is wise to present yourself as specialist in some area online.
It’s very hard to become the next choice.com.au if you are just starting out. So you should specialise in some area that you know well. Doing this will enable you to have a selling point over the bigger sites that can promise a huge amount of traffic. You have to crawl before you can walk.
With the growth of online marketing, Affiliate Marketing is becoming increasingly commonplace. If you think Affiliate Marketing could be something that would help your business, take advantage of the growing trend.