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Is Affiliate Marketing Good For Beginners?
Is Affiliate Marketing Good For Beginners?
There are so many things to learn in the world of online marketing. Beginners can easily become overwhelmed by all of the various business models, tools, and courses they can learn from and implement.
Affiliate marketing is perfect for beginners to embrace because it cuts down on the learning curve substantially. Instead of having to learn everything about online marketing from a soup to nuts perspective, you can simply chop off the product creation elements and pick up with the post-creation promo strategies.
All you need is to find an offer with a good affiliate program. And there are many affiliate platforms in many niches; what about the Amazon affiliate program, or for more digital products, what about Warrior Plus, Clickbank or JVZoo?
You can get started without a website; you simply need your affiliate links to the offer(s) you are promoting. This is a big blessing to many beginner affiliate marketers who want to set up some promotions, but don’t yet know the ins and outs of domains, hosting and blog setup details.
You don’t need to learn product creation skills. The hassle of product development, automated delivery to the customer, and subsequent customer service issues is very draining to someone who is a beginner online.
You will need to learn niche research skills. If you choose a niche that you enjoy or are passionate about, it will make the niche research portion very enjoyable. You’ll want to tackle this aspect of affiliate marketing like an adventure – where you’re always discovering new information and sharing it with your audience.
You’ll want to understand SEO (Search Engine Optimization) if you have a site of your own. Some affiliates do start out with their $10 or so domain and under $10 a month hosting account – just so they won’t have to do this step later.
When you start out this way, or really even if you’re using free platforms, you’ll want to learn the very basic steps associated with SEO. That means understanding keywords and using them in your content creation to attract the right people to your affiliate offers.
Mastering the art of reviews will serve you well as an affiliate. Forget about being a professional writer. Just being casual in your conversations online is what helps buyers trust you and be willing to part with their money.
Beginners do very well in affiliate marketing if they keep their ethics intact. Sometimes, desperation for a quick income can cause you to compromise your beliefs. But if you do that, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot because you’ll be building a reputation as a scammer instead of a leader.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help as an affiliate whenever you get stuck. There are many people online who are willing to explain things and hold your hand through the newbie stage of affiliate marketing.
Ongoing Affiliate Marketing Training
Learning affiliate marketing is not something that happens after you read one blog post, or buy one course, or absorb and implement a video tutorial. It’s an on-going process that evolves over time.
You want to think of affiliate marketing as a continuing education system where you’re always learning, always bettering, and always improving your conversion rates. And that will help your earnings soar.
Learn from a wide variety of people. Yes, over time you’ll have your favorite teachers to learn from – but it’s important t see what kind of golden nuggets other instructors can share that might resonate well with you.
Tackle different styles of affiliate marketing. If you’re only in tangible marketing, why not try to learn how to add digital affiliate marketing to the mix – or vice versa? Or if you’re only using Amazon, why not figure out how to add Commission Junction?
Learn how to advance and tweak your strategies. Never just stick with a beginner’s mindset. You want to learn how to really click with your visitors. So let’s say you feel like you know how to write a product review.
You might be doing just fine with it. But wouldn’t you like to add more conversions, regardless? Who wouldn’t? So learn about how to connect with customers, how to build trust with an audience, and so on. Really expand your learning process to the outer edges.
Test the results of more than one method. Don’t stick with making comparison tables in blog post after blog post – even if it’s working for you. Branch out and learn other methods, like top 10 lists for example.
Understand that the web changes. What may have worked to get you traffic and sales two years ago could be highly obsolete today. You want to keep your pulse on the market and see how trends have evolved.
When video marketing hit the scene, it was an incredible edge some affiliates had over their text-only affiliate competitors because they were able to build trust quickly and easily – and reach more prospects because of YouTube.
Try to invest in several different styles of teaching. A downloadable course is one method. But have you looked into affiliate marketing memberships where you can interact with other affiliates and share strategies?
Or how about paying for a few sessions with an affiliate marketing mentor or coach? That way they could specifically analyze your efforts and help you make headway with your promotions and profits.
Evaluating Info Products For Possible Promotions
If you’re an affiliate marketer who wants to promote digital information products for a commission, then you have to go about it carefully if you want the highest conversion rate with the least amount of refunds.
You want to protect your blog readers and list subscribers from making a worthless purchase, so evaluating the products and reviewing them the right way is important. There are three things you can do to get good results.
Dig around into the product seller’s reputation. Before you buy, you want to know whether the product owner is one of the good guys, or one of the shady marketers.
Sending your customers to buy from someone who doesn’t practice ethics is like sending a lamb to slaughter. They trust you. So make sure you’re looking out for them.
Don’t just read the sales copy to see how you feel about this seller, start digging around online. Look at things like IM Report Card and various forums where anyone has reviewed one of their past products.
If they’re engaging in forums or on their blog, make sure you look to see how they treat people and how they act. Are they someone you’d want to send a good friend or family member to learn from?
You might even test the waters yourself by emailing the marketer to ask a question. How they handle customer service issues could affect your decision on whether or not to promote their products.
Don’t ask for a review copy – buy the product. Sometimes, getting a review copy can make some affiliates feel like they’re obligated to say good things about the product. You want to give an unbiased review, so buying it frees up your conscience.
Another reason to buy it is so that you can go through the process and share what it was like to your readers. Did you encounter any upsells, downsells or one time offers? Did you get immediate access to the product after paying?
Do an implementation review, not just a sales copy review. Too many affiliates simply read the sales copy and report on what the product is. If you want better conversions, then you need to put the product to the test!
Start by reviewing why you decided to buy this product, what you did or didn’t like about the sales copy and buying process, and then share your experience (not the product details) on what it was like to use the product for your own business.
If you want to know more affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free Affiliate Marketing Machine report which complements this post perfectly; download, read it and take action 😊
4 Traffic Generation Tips For Affiliate Marketers
4 Traffic Generation Tips For Affiliate Marketers
So you are interested in affiliate marketing. That’s great because it is a relatively quick, virtually risk-free way to start making money online.
Let’s quickly explain affiliate marketing for beginners in case you are unsure of how it works.
Basically, affiliate marketing is when you promote someone else’s products and when someone buys through your affiliate links, you get paid an affiliate commission.
As an affiliate marketer, you’re acting like a salesperson for the company. You sign up for their affiliate program, help to make a sale, and then the company rewards you.
The best thing about affiliate marketing is that it is incredibly scalable. A typical salesperson will only sell products from one company, or their own products and services. As an affiliate marketer, you can promote products from many different sources and earn commissions from all of them.
Many people try to start with Amazon affiliate marketing because Amazon is such a large, household name. The problem is that their affiliate commissions are tiny compared to other affiliate programs. Don’t rule Amazon out but you need to have realistic expectations when using it.
How much money can you make as an affiliate marketer? Well, the possibilities are endless, and the top performers are easily making 6-7 figure incomes online, and best of all, they don’t have to create or support their own products.
There are many affiliate platforms and programs that you can apply to join depending on your niche.
But if a product or service looks like a good fit for you and they don’t offer an official affiliate program, you can reach out to them and see if they would be willing for you to promote it to your audience in return for a commission. Many companies will agree because it is a win-win for them, After all, you are sending traffic to their offers so it’s not costing them any time or effort unless they make a sale.
And on the topic of traffic…
As an affiliate marketer, it’s crucial that you know how to drive traffic to your offers. This is a skill that will make or break you. So, you’ll to need to devote a huge chunk of your time in the beginning to learning how to drive traffic. While simple in concept, it’s not entirely easy and will require effort on your part.
Unlike product creators who can rely on affiliates to drive traffic, as an affiliate, you can only count on yourself. The traffic you generate can either be from free methods or paid traffic.
If you have the budget for it, you can use paid traffic. It’s faster and you get feedback much quicker. You have complete control of targeting so you will know who sees your ads and if you get your targeting right, you should be able to break even on your ad spend on your front end offers.
This effectively means you are building a buyers list for free and this is a crucial part of any online business as these buyers can be put in front of more offers.
However, if you’re a beginner and short on funds, there are many free methods of traffic generation that are effective too. The term ‘free’ is deceptive because you’ll be paying for it in time and effort, and you must be patient before you see any noticeable results; this may be frustrating, but you need to understand this from the beginning!
Nevertheless, you can drive free traffic and still make sales if you know what to do. Below you’ll find a few tips that you should always bear in mind when driving traffic.
Know Where Your Audience Hangs Out
You must know where your niche audience hangs out. If it’s a bodybuilding crowd you’re targeting, they’ll probably be on bodybuilding forums, fan pages for bodybuilders, YouTube channels featuring fitness experts and so on. So, you can go into these places and start siphoning traffic from there to your sites.
It is important to know who your target market is and what they are looking for. This is so often overlooked by marketers of all persuasions because it isn’t the most interesting thing to do, but it is one of the most important!
Create an ideal customer avatar and refer to it whenever you are writing sales copy, blog posts or creating videos to promote your affiliate offers.
If you know who they are, what they want and their specific pain points, you will be much more successful in gaining the sale.
Start With One Method
The reason so many marketers never do well with traffic is because they never focus their efforts on one method. If you’re going with video marketing, create a good channel and keep making videos till you have a following. Learn how to optimize your channel and videos so that you rank.
If you’re using Facebook groups, learn how to get more members in your group and post stuff that they like, and which can be linked to your web properties.
If you are blogging, learn to write interesting and engaging posts that are crammed with helpful information that your readers will enjoy and appreciate. Be consistent and write often. Don’t write short posts but instead go for longer posts that can go into more detail (a 1000 word minimum is a good benchmark to aim for). Learn about SEO so you can get your blog posts ranked in the search engines.
Pick one traffic method and strive to master it until you have an avalanche of traffic coming to your sites, etc. Once that’s successful, you can move on to the next traffic method while maintaining the current one.
Repeated And Relentless Effort
Driving traffic is a continuous process. Keep repeating your efforts and never give up. Even if your first few videos have only 10 or 20 views, keep going. Over time you will get more views and a bigger audience.
It takes time for things to snowball. remember what I said earlier; patience is key with free traffic methods.
The same applies to most traffic methods. The more videos you have, the more traffic you’ll get. The more people in your Facebook group, the more comments and engagement you’ll get. The more blog posts you write, the more visitors will come to your website. The more paid ads you create, the higher your chances of finding winning campaigns. It’s all a matter of time and repeated effort.
Engagement
This is another important factor. Engage with your traffic. Reply to comments on your videos. Like and respond to comments in your Facebook groups and ads. If you have commenting enabled on your blog and someone takes the time to comment, reply to them and thank them for taking the time to comment.
The more you engage, the better your relationship with your audience will be. They’ll grow to like you, trust you and will eventually buy through you.
Remember these pointers when driving traffic. It’s not as difficult as most marketers make it out to be. Once you understand how it works and you’re consistent, you will see results. The key to traffic generation is consistency. That’s where most marketers fail.
Get this right and you’ll have all the traffic you want.
Once you have started to make progress you can rinse and repeat with another traffic method.
If you want to know more affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free Affiliate Marketing Machine report which complements this post perfectly; download, read it and take action 😊
3 Types Of Affiliate Marketing Landing Pages
As an affiliate, your job is to connect buyers and sellers. You’re a middleman. That means you have the power to decide where you send the visitor when they click on your links.
Of course, you will already have picked your niche and found a hungry market, right? If not, you can find out more down below 😊
When you’re out on the social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest, you will be linking the readers to a specific landing page.
The landing page is the initial place your traffic goes to – and there are different strategies involved in courting them to a sale.
Product Sales Page
The first place you can send someone is directly to the product. You can grab an affiliate link to your favorite product, go directly onto Instagram or Facebook, and write a short review with your thoughts.
You can do it in a shorter sense on Twitter. With Pinterest, you could write a blurb that gets them to click through.
But this strategy isn’t something you can build a long-term business on. It offers some benefits, but nothing that allows you to comprehensive conversions over time. For that, you’ll want to send them to your blog or squeeze page.
Blog Post Page
A blog landing page allows you to really go into depth on a subject with a product review that exhaustively answers all questions or doubts that the person may have.
It puts them in your environment, where they’re also exposed to other posts and ads you have on your site.
Make sure you have an opt-in form on this page so you can grow your email list, and embedded links to various offers in your post. If these links are to affiliate products, you can ‘pre-sell’ the product in the article and then they will be much more likely to buy the product when they get to the sales page.
Squeeze Page
A squeeze page doesn’t give you as much opportunity to convert the visitor into a sale right at that specific moment in time, but it does give you the ability to court the customer for weeks and months (if not years) afterward.
As stated in the previous section, an even better combination is to use an opt in form on your blog, so that you have the ability to give your comprehensive review and collect the contact information of your visitors.
The blog post page and squeeze page are examples of bridge pages in affiliate marketing and they are critical to your ongoing success because the biggest drawback to affiliate marketing is that you don’t get to build a list of prospects and/or buyers; these will be exclusive to the product vendor whose product(s) you are sending traffic to.
So, ideally you would never send traffic direct to the affiliate product sales page, but to some kind of bridge page where you can capture their details before you send them to the sales page.
That way you are building your list and maybe getting some nice affiliate commissions into the bargain 😊
Of course, the key to your online success is always testing and tracking. You want to see which of these landing pages delivers better results for you and then ramp up those efforts.
Then, once you find the one(s) that have the best returns for you traffic-wise, you want to take those pages and split test them to see if you can boost conversions by tweaking small elements to the page.
That might include colors, headlines, order buttons, text versus graphic links, and more. There are tools you can get to actually track it for you and rotate the pages for you automatically.
So, you know where to send traffic to, but do you know the best niches to target with affiliate marketing? Let’s take a look…
What Are The Top Affiliate Marketing Niches?
The top niches aren’t specific to affiliates versus product creators.
They’re all going to be the same. But some allow affiliates to make more money because they combine tangible and digital opportunities.
Bear in mind that all these can be further split up into sub-niches and the further you drill down into a niche, the more targeted your audience will be, albeit a smaller audience.
Dating
Relationships are one of the top niches online – people wanting to meet compatible matches and people wanting to save their existing relationships.
But there aren’t as many tangible items you can promote in this niche. It’s primarily info product related.
But this isn’t really a problem as there are some very good products or courses out there that you can promote if you are thinking about going into the dating niche
Money
Money is a similar niche that primarily has digital info product courses available to promote.
But keep in mind that these two top niches have courses online that pay out a nice amount per sale – and plenty of people searching for them online.
You can target people wanting to save money, people wanting to get out of debt (not the best if they are suffering with this) or those wanting to make money (could be online or offline).
Diet
Diet is a sub-niche of the health and fitness niche and is one that’s evergreen in nature, suitable for both genders and many age groups – plus it offers a bevy of opportunities to sell both digital and tangible items.
There are many online digital courses to help with weight loss, and many of them cater to a specific audience, like baby boomers or women.
On the tangible side, you could promote many things in the diet niche on sites like Amazon. You could do a review of an info product course and then pair it with tangible promotions for things like treadmills, elliptical machines, DVD exercise sets, Kettlebells, supplements and more.
Personal Development
Self-help is a popular niche. People are looking for more mindset advice – stress relief, for example.
You can pair an info product course promotion with the promotion of items like soothing candles, supplements, stress-busting gadgets, and even massage technology.
There is also the option to find coaching programs in this niche which will inevitably sell for a much higher price and therefore higher commissions for you.
Insomnia
Insomnia is a popular niche. Sleep disorders are very common and there are both digital and tangible products available for you to promote on your site.
Along with a digital course, think of tangibles like better bedding, soothing CDs, sleep masks, white noise machines, sleep supplements, and more.
A review site would be a great idea for many of these items; write a review, send traffic to the article and link out to the product(s).
Coffee
Coffee and other gourmet foods are popular.
When you have someone who is an enthusiast for coffee, they’ll spend top dollar on a variety of things – from courses teaching them about the topic to special tangible items like coffee grinders, brewers, beans, and more.
The coffee niche has exploded in recent years so this is one to definitely look into if you are interested in this kind of niche.
Parenting
Parenting is a popular niche, too. This is a niche where moms and dads like to get advice on raising their kids, but they also have many tangible items to buy like nursery furniture, toys, educational items, clothes and more.
It is also an evergreen niche because people will always be having kids!
Once again, it may be good to drill down a bit deeper such as pregnant moms, single moms, bringing up teenagers etc.
Pets
Pets are great affiliate niches – and you can specialize in one that you enjoy – dogs, cats, and tropical fish being the most popular.
You can buy both info products on things like how to care for tropical fish – and tangible items like fancy aquariums, fish food and tank décor.
And let’s face it, most pet owners are fanatical about them; some probably treat them better than their kids 😄
Homeware
Household items are a big niche – and this goes for both indoor and outdoor.
Homeowners are always buying like blenders, vacuums, lawnmowers, sheds, gardening supplies and more.
They also buy info products to go with them, like how to grow tomatoes – and you could sell everything from the seeds to the pots they grow in!
If you want to know more about affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download it read it and take action 😊
Online Marketers: One Simple Shift That “Guarantees” Success
It’s my opinion that any online marketer – regardless of niche – who doesn’t do the following is essentially hiking up a rocky mountain barefoot when s/he could be taking the ski lift.
Online marketing boils down to this: We either create our own products or choose affiliate products, and then we spend our precious time, energy and money getting people to BUY those products.
But only a relatively small percentage of marketers make the one simple shift that will catapult them to success.
I’m going to focus on product creators here but this applies to affiliate marketing as well.
Normal Product Launch
Here’s the traditional launch a product method:
- You get an idea for a product.
- You do some research and you believe this product will sell well.
- You create the entire product.
- You create the entire sales funnel that will sell the product, including squeeze page, upsells, downsells, sales page, product delivery page, affiliate page, etc.
- You line up affiliates and convince them to promote your launch.
- You launch and you make sales and you don’t sleep for a week because of all the customer service requests and affiliate hand holding necessary.
- Then you pay affiliate commissions, pay affiliate bonuses, pay your web designers and copywriters and all of that if you haven’t already.
- You’re exhausted. And this didn’t make the kind of money you thought it would, so you…
- …start over with a new product and new sales funnel.
- You do this as quickly and as often as you can without going insane.
- Idea – product – funnel – affiliates – launch – repeat.
- You realize you’re working 60 hours a week.
Sound familiar?
“New” Product Launch
Let’s add a twist:
- You get an idea for a continuity product like a membership, newsletter or software as a service.
- You do research to confirm this product will likely sell well.
- You create just a small portion of the product if it’s informational – about one month of content. If it’s software, you outsource the creation of it (unless you’re a coder, which you’re probably not, so let someone else do it for you).
- You create a page to offer either a free or $1 trial of the product. You could create an entire funnel, but you’re lazy so you just create the one page.
- You drive traffic (free or paid) and you get your initial members.
- You continue to get paid on those sales every single month.
- You see which traffic methods are working and you keep using those.
- You regularly update the product.
- You continue to get trial members, many of which continue on as full paying members.
- You may or may not use affiliates – that’s totally up to you.
- This same membership sells for years. YEARS. Because you keep updating it.
- Life is good. You know how much money you will make next month. You work 10-20 hours a month.
- You’re not breaking your own spirit by continually having to create new products. There is no way you would ever get a ‘real’ job again.
The Power Of Residual Income
This second scenario can be just a small launch, perhaps to your own list just to see if it’s going to sell well. You don’t have to sweat the 101 things that go along with a huge launch because this isn’t a: “Sell it hard and get out fast.” kind of thing. You’re selling this membership, newsletter or SAAS for months or years to come, and earning residual income, too.
You can start a membership site in a week and buy enough traffic to see if it’s a winner. If not, tweak it and try again, or get a better idea. You’re not out much money or time. (A full-blown launch can cost you hundreds of hours and a small fortune in copywriting, page design, affiliate contests and so forth.)
You’re essentially giving away initial access, so affiliates are optional. Fancy sales copy is optional. If you’re offering the right product to the right audience at the right price (free or $1) then selling just got a whole lot easier.
And it’s residual. $10 a month. $20 a month. $47 a month. You pick the price. You get 200 new trial members the first week and 100 stick with you – you can do the math. You get 200 new trial members every single week for 52 weeks and half of those stay in the membership for several months – you can do the math.
Yes, there is attrition. But if you’re offering the right newsletter or membership or software, that attrition rate can be surprisingly low. Think of a software someone needs to run their business. Are they going to cancel? Not unless you stop updating.
Think of a newsletter or membership that gives them the crucial info they need to succeed (business or personal, doesn’t matter). Are they going to cancel? No way.
I love products that pay residual income.
I sell my own and I sell other people’s residual products as an affiliate.
My reasoning is simple: Why work myself to death to create products that only pay me one time when I can create products that pay me over and over again? And these are products that I can keep selling for years to come.
Consider this: Do you want to do 2 to 4 major product launches each year? I know guys who do one per month. It’s crazy.
Or do you want to have maybe 1 or 2 products that you can continually sell for years that happen to bring you residual income, too?
Residual income might well be considered the 8th wonder of the business world. When you’re earning residual income, you have income security with LESS work than if you did a big fancy launch every 2 to 6 months.
Do you know what it takes to do a big launch? It’s exhausting. And when it’s over and the affiliates are paid and the bonuses are paid and all the expenses are handled, you realize that even though the launch went great (assuming it didn’t flop) you still didn’t make as much money as you thought you would.
Which is why you see marketers doing one big launch after another after another. It’s work and frankly it’s not fun.
If you wonder why so many ‘big name’ marketers come and go after a few years, this is the reason.
Be kind to yourself and work smart. Sell products with residual income.
Of course, to be able to sell anything you need to be skilled at copywriting and there are good and bad ways to do this. To learn about some of the common pitfalls to avoid when copywriting, check out the featured resource below to gat a free report; download, read it and take action 🙂
7 Reasons Why You Need An Affiliate Program
If you’ve created and launched a product or you have an online store, you probably need traffic.
Even if you do all the heavy lifting yourself by using a combination of SEO, email marketing and paid ads, you’ll still be scratching the surface when it comes to marketing your products/services.
You NEED An Affiliate Program!
This Alone Should Be Enough!
Imagine having your very own team of salespeople raving about your products all over the internet… Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Of course, it does. Having an affiliate program can truly skyrocket your sales once you get the competent affiliates on board. You’ll have an army of sales people helping you to get sales.
This obvious benefit alone should be enough to convince you to set up an affiliate program for your products/store. You’d be leaving money on the table if you didn’t… and setting up an affiliate program is really not as difficult as you think.
These days, it’s easy to set up an affiliate program with software such as iDevAffiliate. Just install the plugin or use their cloud hosting and you’ll be good to go within a few minutes.
How It Works
The process is mostly automated. An interested affiliate will sign up to your affiliate program either by invitation or they may find you online. You can then decide if you wish to manually approve them (recommended) or if they’re automatically approved by the system.
They’ll get an affiliate link which they can use in their promotions, and this link will cookie their potential customers.
Any sales generated by them will be reflected on their dashboard (and yours) and you can send them their payouts weekly or monthly (or at intervals you choose).
With the software mentioned above, affiliate management and tracking are a breeze. Thanks to their intuitive interfaces which keep things simple.
Here are 6 More Benefits Of Having An Affiliate Program
More Targeted Traffic
Besides boosting your sales, an affiliate program will also get you more targeted traffic. Your affiliates may have niche sites and their own audience who will be looking for just the type of products/services you’re offering.
They’ll gladly buy your products if your sales copy is good – and if your site looks reputable.
Your conversions will not only be higher, but this method of marketing is more effective than paid ads which is basically ‘spraying, praying and paying’ until you have enough data to narrow down your winning ads.
Using affiliates is definitely an effective way to get sales quickly. That said, many marketing articles will tell you that using affiliates is the cheapest way to get sales, since you won’t be spending on advertising, etc.
However, we believe that it’s the most expensive way to get sales, depending on the commission rates you’re offering.
Digital products on ClickBank offer as high as 50%-75% commission rates per sale. Stores like Walmart offer anywhere from 10%-15% commission, and Amazon offers even lower rates.
It goes without saying that the more attractive your rates are, the more affiliates will want to promote you. This can take quite a hefty chunk out of your profits.
However, affiliates can bring in a deluge of sales that you’d not have gotten on your own. So, it’s worth paying more just to get more sales, even if it means settling for less profit per sale.
Overall, you WILL make more, if you get your numbers right. Just know that it’s NOT the cheapest way to get sales.
Increased Brand Awareness
Having affiliates praising your products from the digital rooftops of their web properties is the online version of marketing via ‘word-of-mouth’
And it’s one of the best ways to increase brand awareness and get your products noticed by more people than you’ll ever be able to reach on your own.
Getting others to sing praises about your brand will be far more effective than blowing your own horn with hyped up sales copy.
SEO Benefits
Have you ever noticed that Amazon products rank for many search terms?
One of the reasons for this is the thousands of affiliates who are linking back to the Amazon website/products. This massive number of backlinks pointing to Amazon helps them rank quickly and easily in the search engine results.
Similarly, having affiliates linking back to your site will be a favorable sign to the almighty eye of Google – which will deem your site worthy of a higher position in the search engines (because of the backlinks pointing to it).
So, affiliates may be able to indirectly help you with your search engine optimization efforts.
Form Mutually Beneficial Partnerships
Some of your affiliates may have their own products and online stores. You could work out reciprocal mailings with them. By promoting each other, both parties will benefit.
You might even be able to do a joint venture with some affiliates and launch products with them. The possibilities are endless – and having an affiliate program will open up these opportunities to you.
Just be sure to pair up with those marketers with whom you have shared values, so you know that what you share of theirs to your subscribers will be high quality and valuable to them.
Low Risk
With affiliates, you only pay when they make a sale. This is a performance-based reward system that has very little risk for you. Marketers with on a tight budget will do better with affiliates.
Paid advertising is effective, but risky. Not to mention the learning curve where you’ll be spending money on ads until you can find a few winning ones that yield profit.
Many beginner marketers will not be able to stomach this risk… and will be better off using affiliate traffic instead.
Full Flexibility
As the vendor, you’ll get to decide the commission rates, whom to accept as affiliates, which products they can promote and so on. There’s a lot of flexibility here and you call the shots.
Do note that with great power comes great responsibility. Ensure that your affiliates are paid on time, every time – and be fair with your commission rates so that their efforts are worth their time.
Never try to short-change your affiliates. It’s not good form and word will get around.
In Conclusion…
By now, you’ll realize that setting up an affiliate program is a necessity if you wish to take your online business to the next level. There’s so much to gain with very few downsides.
Use reliable affiliate software such as iDevAffiliate and you’ll be up and running in no time at all.
Then go out there and proactively recruit affiliates and treat them well. Reward the better performing ones with extra perks and always be transparent with them.
If you have the right attitude and attractive remuneration rates, your affiliates will respect you and go out of their way to promote you. It’s a win-win situation for all involved.
From here on, you can scale up and expand your online business exponentially. It doesn’t get better than that.
BTW, if you want to know more about affiliate marketing as a business model, then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download it read it and take action 🙂