Affiliate marketing has been around since the early days of the internet, and today, in a world of social media personalities and influencers with millions of followers, its relevance has only grown.
Marketers and businesses know that — over 80% of brands around the globe have or have used affiliate programs, with the US having the largest stake in the global affiliate sector with 39%. Around 16% of all internet orders in the US are from affiliate programs.
Despite its widespread popularity, achieving success in affiliate marketing requires the right strategies to make these efforts worthwhile. In this article, we’ll highlight some of the winning affiliate marketing strategies that will help you get started.
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What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing approach in which affiliates are paid for sales from promoting a company’s services or products. Usually, affiliates will receive either a flat fee per sale generated (or click) or a commission, all based on the affiliate structure program and the company’s preference.
Crafting a solid affiliate marketing plan makes perfect sense for businesses, as this approach takes less work to set up than employing their own sales reps. Paying a reasonable fee is far more appealing than allocating a heftier ad campaign budget too.
Most often, affiliate strategies are compared to referral programs, the main difference being that affiliate programs are less personal. In some cases, businesses may use both approaches to increase brand awareness and generate passive income.
Strategies for Affiliate Marketing
With that out of the way, here are the eight best, actionable affiliate marketing strategies:
Choose the Right People
The truth is that strategies for affiliate marketing only work with the right partners.
Do your research and reach out to a potential affiliate targeting the same or similar audience. For instance, if you are selling animal products, look for an affiliate who is involved in the pet industry or whose branding incorporates animals in some way.
Don’t forget to check out the potential affiliate’s customer engagement rates and audience size. A massive following doesn’t always mean that a considerable percentage of those people will spend money.
Typically, you will want to opt for affiliates who are already established marketers with a proven track record. If you need help with it, you can always consider speaking to affiliate digital marketing companies.
Consider Niche Influencers
While influencer marketing isn’t exactly affiliate marketing, this approach can be highly beneficial for your business, especially if you manage to find a niche influencer whose profile highly aligns with the products or services you offer.
These people have a highly targeted audience who trust their recommendations and reviews. This special relationship also simplifies the process of building trust with your brand among the audience through association.
Diversify Your Affiliate Plan
Having a diverse affiliate program will enable you to cover more ground and set yourself up for better success. Diversity in your strategy would mean partnering with several affiliates on various platforms and setting up a unique plan with each of them.
For instance, you can opt to partner with influencers on TikTok and Instagram, join one of Amazon’s affiliate programs, and partner with an affiliate marketing agency or a review site to feature your products.
While this can look a bit overwhelming at first, when set up right, it can help boost your digital engagement and open possibilities for further success in email and content marketing.
Create an Epic Post
The next strategy involves a more hands-on approach which is highly rewarding. If you are working with an affiliate partner, consider creating an epic blog post on your affiliate’s website.
The “epic” post should be a comprehensive guide about a specific product or service. It shouldn’t merely be a review; instead, aim for a fully-fledged guide with an intro, how-to, best practices, FAQ, and even troubleshooting resources for potential buyers.
The more information your affiliate packs in the article, the greater the likelihood that leads will make an actual purchase. Additionally, such a post will be highly shareable, with the potential to bring you valuable rank-friendly backlinks too.
Don’t stop here: create comprehensive review videos about the service or product, upload them to YouTube, embed them in the post, and ask your affiliate partner to add the affiliate link in the video description. With this step, you’ve covered two different channels.
Also, don’t forget that YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet, and video can help you generate a substantial amount of traffic via affiliate links. Videos may also rank on Google.
Consider Hosting and Recording a Webinar
This may seem far-fetched, but webinars can be extremely useful in sharing more personal messages with potential buyers. Live webinars can also be treated like actual events, making it an even more exclusive phenomenon than a simple affiliate link in a well-written post.
If a webinar is applicable in your case, consider working together with your affiliate on the event. You can share high-value info about the product, host Q&As, and talk about its benefits, addressing the most common pain points it aims to solve.
Don’t forget to record the webinar and embed it on the affiliate website for new viewers and those who may wish to rewatch it. Your affiliate can either create a blog post or a specific landing page for it and offer multiple options for viewers to click on the link and make a purchase.
Give Away Bonuses
This simple yet powerful approach is one of the best affiliate marketing strategies out there.
Have your affiliate partner promote the product and incentivize purchases through their affiliate link by offering a bonus as a token of gratitude to buyers.
What can these bonuses be? It could be another product that complements the original affiliate offer, a discount for other goods or a mini guide in PDF format.
The idea is to enhance the purchase experience by adding more value, thereby making the buyers feel more exclusive.
Consider Indirect Promotions
Most affiliates' websites are the focal point of their affiliate marketing strategy, hosting the affiliate link directing visitors to your products or services. Still, it’s essential to take advantage of other channels too.
Social Media
Your affiliate partner can give your products an indirect push on social media. Instead of directly sharing the affiliate link, they can link to other content like a blog post, video, or webinar signup page, which subtly promotes your products. This way, your partner isn’t linking directly to the affiliate link but to other resources that provide more engagement and build trust before clicking on the affiliate link.
The Affiliate’s Email List
Email marketing alone can be a powerful promotion tool, with around 60% of consumers saying that promotional emails have influenced their purchase decisions. Go about this the same way you would with social media. Have your affiliate partner promote content in their emails, such as a blog post, video or other relevant material, with the affiliate link included.
Email marketing is about gaining trust and offering a more personalized channel for your leads by providing valuable content. While directing them to the affiliate link may take more time, it will also build momentum and add value at each step of the buyer’s journey.
Other Websites
If your affiliate partner often writes quest posts, they can include links back to a post or other content on their site where readers can discover the affiliate link.
Compare at Least Two Different Products of the Same Type
This affiliate marketing plan covers more bandwidth and increases the chances of making a sale. If you aim to sell several products of the same type, ask your affiliate partner to compare them, review them, give their recommendation, and use affiliate links for each product.
This allows you to kill two birds with one stone. Potential buyers won’t have to perform tedious research to compare these products; and no matter which option they go for, they will click on an affiliate link.
Such comprehensive roundup reviews may also become epic posts, turning into assets capable of driving passive sales.
Affiliate Marketing for Businesses: Best Practices
While those are the essentials, affiliate marketing is a long game, so consider the following best practices:
Optimize Your Website for Conversions
To ensure that your affiliate strategies help you reach your business goals, you must also ensure that your website is set up correctly for conversions.
It should be in tip-top shape to handle increased traffic and other actions, such as inquiries, signups, and sales. Additionally, review your content to ensure that it effectively communicates what people are seeking.
Reassess Your Content Marketing Strategy
Ensure that your content marketing strategy is current to establish credibility and social proof for your products or services. This shouldn’t be a problem if you’ve been running a website for some time, but it can be a significant speed bump if you start a new site with entirely fresh content.
Users who end up on your site by clicking the affiliate link likely seek customer reviews, product tutorials, comparisons, and other content to build trust before clicking the “buy” button.
Check Your Payment Model
Before partnering with an affiliate, consider the options you have regarding payment. Typically, there are three models for affiliate payments:
- The pay-per-sale model involves paying a predetermined percentage commission for every realized sale.
- The pay-per-click model entails paying based on the increased traffic. This strategy is ideal if you aim to direct leads to specific platforms or websites.
- The pay-per-lead model operates by compensating your affiliates if they successfully direct a potential customer to your site and they take action such as downloading something, signing up, or subscribing.
Take Advantage of Busy Seasons
Your affiliate marketing strategies can also be timed for holiday-specific promotions. Leverage your obvious choices like Christmas, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and if applicable, you can also take advantage of Valentine’s Day, Easter and so on.
Crafting the Ultimate Affiliate Strategy
As with many things, affiliate marketing requires the correct tactical approach to succeed. Its effectiveness hugely depends on the type of content you and your affiliates craft and how they market your products and services. Nonetheless, by adopting the right approach and following the guidelines provided above, you can develop a strategy that benefits you, your affiliates, and the customers.
And if you’re unsure where to start, you can always contact a marketing agency to guide you toward success.
Affiliate Marketing Strategies FAQs
How can you make money quickly with affiliate marketing?
The best way to generate more money is to opt for high-converting products and aim to partner with an affiliate with a well-targeted audience. High-quality video, post, and review content is also paramount to help you sell.
What are the key differences between influencer and affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing promotes products or services through affiliate links, where affiliates earn a commission to drive sales. In contrast, influencer marketing focuses on leveraging the influence of individuals with large followings to endorse products or services to their audience, typically through sponsored content or collaborations.
How can I track the success of my affiliate marketing efforts?
Fortunately, you can leverage several tracking solutions and other available software to help you monitor the generated revenue, conversions, and clicks from these links. On the other hand, affiliate programs already offer tracking systems that allow you to oversee the effectiveness of your campaigns.
