As the definition of affiliate marketing goes, it is a low risk and simple marketing strategy deriving substantial return to your business boosting your online sales. Most of the affiliate programs are provided free of cost whereby you are assigned a unique affiliate ID with an affiliate link post when you sign up for any affiliate program. With the help of this affiliate link you earn a commission while promoting other businesses and products. This helps your business to earn an extra profit. It is like a symbiotic relationship whereby two businesses derive benefits from each other.
Affiliate marketing- where you hire affiliates and pay them to draw attention of the customers to your businesses, functions quite similar to that of outsourced marketing. This implies not just attracting the target users to visit your website but also converting them into potential consumers while trying to produce traffic as a marketer, the main goal being here is to boost the number of consumers. Through proper utilization of affiliate marketing you need to garner millions of visitors every month, and convert them to revenue else this whole act of affiliate marketing strategy stands futile. Thus counting on this affiliate marketing proves beneficial for local businesses.
Features of Affiliate Marketing
- To track the prominent affiliates that drives your traffic, every affiliate comes with a tracking URL
- Paid traffic through proper AdWords Management
- Sharing the product video over YouTube and connect it to the affiliate ID
- Other significant ways are reviewing products, blog post, email blast, etc.
The potential of promoting your business through affiliates are endless. Hence it is advisable to limit your channels of promotion when you sign up affiliates.
- When a visitor purchases something or signs up through the affiliate link, the prospective customers or leads are acquired that makes the business profitable.
- In turn you pay the affiliates their due commission.
An important point to highlight is there is some major difference between affiliate marketing a referral program. Referral program is nothing but a way to promote businesses aggressively to spread it among the mass. They are meant for those who are already customers. Affiliates are the online users who have the potential of becoming your customers. You can hire them through various affiliate programs, blog posts or joining hands with various affiliate marketing service providers.
Thus affiliate marketing has become one of the latest buzz amongst the online marketing strategies. It definitely gives the business an edge over its competitors when used in the proper way. Every concept has certain pros and cons and the understanding of both is quite necessary to use it optimally.
First the PROS,
Affiliate marketing has proven end results especially with small businesses and start-ups. Following are the advantages:
- You only pay after you get the results implying that after the visitors get converted to your potential customers
- Affiliate marketing proves to be one of the cost effective strategies that fulfils the requirement for a small business
- Affiliates understand segmentation better. This strategy creates copies and reaches segments.
- Affiliate marketing determines the cost per acquisition which gives you a better understanding of your profit and loss data.
- It is a risk-averse concept where you can never really lose money.
Now the CONS,
Here goes the flip-side of this marketing strategy:
- A way of branding your business hence you need to be careful as they control the message that you send across to your users through your business. Their purpose is to earn commission from your business.
- These are incapable to judge the lead quality which might be good always.
- It is if not properly managed then can generate traffic from unreputable source that might have grave impact on your brand.
Thus you can drive revenue and growth of your businesses with the cost effective affiliate marketing. Since it is currently trending the online marketing space, it is advisable to take assistance from the professional experts to have a better understanding and derive maximum results.
