5 Affiliate Marketing Techniques to Generate More Sales
Affiliate marketing has massive potential for driving up sales and generating leads. That is why more brands are using accelerated performance-based marketing tactics to boost their revenue. According to Oberlo, 60% of buyers prefer reading blogs before making a purchase. Online content has become the number one source for collecting information, and affiliate marketing is the heart of content marketing.
Delaying the implementation of affiliate marketing strategies is like creating an obstacle in your revenue stream. In this article, I have shared 5 affiliate marketing techniques to generate more sales. These strategies are designed to deliver robust results and surge your revenue while boosting your online presence. Moreover, you can deploy these affiliate marketing techniques even if you’re an individual with a knack for writing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is when brands collaborate with various affiliates to promote their product or service. These affiliates either have a massive audience on social media or tremendous traffic on their website. When a potential buyer purchases through an affiliate marketing link, the said promoter receives a commission for the sale. This commission varies between brands, and you can pay your affiliates for clicks, sales, or leads.
Affiliate marketing techniques are called performance-based marketing strategies because their success depends on how convincing or influential your affiliate is. Affiliate marketing also allows brands to reach a wider audience, and it helps them expand their territories. Around 81% of brands use affiliate marketing to capture their audience’s attention, generate leads, or engage with existing customers.
However, affiliate marketing requires patience and perseverance. Most brands expect to see results in just a few months, and such results are not possible. Investing time and money in affiliate marketing pays well in the long-run when customers become aware of your product, and leads automatically start converting into sales.
5 Affiliate Marketing Techniques to Generate Sales
Many successful brands work with expensive affiliates but fail to generate noteworthy results. This is because either their strategies are flawed or they don’t utilize all the channels of affiliate marketing. There are several affiliate marketing channels to be leverage and we are going to explore all of them in this article.
1. Choose the Right Affiliate
Affiliate marketing allows brands to leverage the power of influence to promote their business. Similar to celebrity endorsements, digital marketing has prominent bloggers, Instagramers, and YouTubers. However, not every influencer with a massive following is a good affiliate.
You have to find influencers within your niche to boost your sale. Secondly, your affiliate must have an engaged audience meaning their credibility will be based on the number of likes and comments on their posts. Finally, before choosing an affiliate it’s essential to make sure they check all these boxes.
- They have a good rapport with their audience
- 40% of their audience must be 90% similar to the brand’s target audience
- They have a strong following, high site ranking, view, engagements, and authority.
These points make sure businesses don’t invest in the wrong affiliate and expect unattainable results.
2. Offer Discounts and Coupons
Finding the correct affiliate is the first step towards successful affiliate marketing. The second step is to offer incentives to online audiences to make a purchase. Regardless of how well an affiliate promotes a particular product, internet audiences won’t be interested in purchasing unless they are incentivized. Offering discounts and coupons might seem like losing money, but it translates into higher revenue in the long haul.
When online users are incentivized through discounts, their purchase decision is governed by the thought of saving money. This mitigates the chances of losing sales to competitors. However, long-term discounts can affect customer loyalty adversely. The best practice is to offer discounts in particular months.
These promotions will train your buyers to visit affiliate marketing websites in these months. As the web traffic authority transitions from affiliates to business owners, leads convert into sales quickly because brands know best how, where, and when it is profitable for them to make sales.
3. Build an Affiliate Network
Brands that rely on affiliates gain substantial revenue; however, they are subjected to work either with or under their affiliates. Sometimes, contracts are revised, and affiliates increase their percentage share. This revision of terms adversely affects business growth as affiliates keep manipulating the contract terms to their benefit.
The best way to avoid loss is by creating affiliate networks. This gives brands the power they require over affiliates. Moreover, brands with their own affiliate network don’t rely on affiliates for their sales; instead, it’s the other way around.
Creating affiliate network is time-consuming than challenging. However, patience and perseverance are virtues when it comes to affiliate marketing. Once brands have established successful YouTubers, Bloggers, or Instagramers on board, affiliate marketing becomes highly cost-effective, niche-specific, and relatively easier.
4. Expand Your Affiliate Portfolio
While consistency is crucial for successful affiliate marketing, being monotonous has adverse effects. Sticking to a handful of affiliates over one or two affiliate channels soon becomes expensive. Brands that expand their affiliate portfolio have seen massive success with their strategies. There are many platforms besides YouTube, Instagram, and Blogging websites. Here is a list of common affiliate marketing channels.
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Paid Search Microsites
Creating sites for monetization can garner huge sales. Microsites are sub-sites centered on a single campaign and designed to promote niche-specific products or services. Most businesses create these sites to increase their brand visibility. These sites are unique and separate from an organization’s main website and feature-focused content that’s specific and relevant to the audience.
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Email Lists
While most brands assume email marketing has become redundant, affiliates have turned email campaigns into a substantial revenue-making source. Contrary to popular belief, email marketing has staggering open rates that vary between industries. Partnering with email marketing affiliates widens the target audience cap and unlocks untapped consumer markets.
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Large Media Websites
Large media sites host various products on their websites and are created to accumulate traffic. These platforms might have a small chance of tapping into a brand’s target audience but the cosmic traffic they have on their sites serves as means of enhancing brand visibility.
5. Optimize Your Product Page
Many brands partner with various affiliates and then sit back to watch their sales grow. However, this is not a good strategy. A crucial fact to keep in mind is that affiliate marketing isn’t directly connected to generating sales. It is a means of congregating leads and converting them into sales.
Expecting affiliate programs to handle all the customer queries and refund options is an unrealistic approach. The ideal stance for on-page marketing teams is to optimize their landing page for conversions. This means all the elements and calls-to-action should influence the visitors and help in the checkout process.
Imbedding long signup forms and requisite non-essential shipping details can sink most marketing efforts. Avoiding friction and maintaining page speed can boost sales since customers don’t have to go through tons of pages before making a purchase. Moreover, optimized landing pages that facilitate rapid purchasing ensure potential customers aren’t lost to competitors.
How to Find Affiliate Marketers?
You can need to spend some time finding the right affiliates, ensuring they are a good fit. Moreover, it’s a combination of having an excellent affiliate program and reaching out to the right people. Of course, offering generous commission is always a plus point.
1. Join Affiliate Network Directories
There are several affiliate marketing directories on Google where businesses can find the right affiliates for their product or service. These directories serve as means of connecting businesses with affiliates; however, reaching out to affiliates through directories might be expensive for most brands. The reason for this is that affiliates tend to quote high prices when they are approached through a professional medium.
Contacting affiliates through social media and or email might prove to be cost-effective if brands build a relationship before asking for their services. Sometimes, affiliates review products sent to them for free. Utilizing the affiliate directories for offering free-bees to affiliates can be cost-effective and boost brand visibility.
2. Leverage Facebook
Facebook has transitioned from being a social media platform to an all-rounder platform. There are various affiliate marketing groups where brands can locate beginner-level affiliates who won’t charge as much as social media celebrities.
3. Turn Customers into Affiliates
The best way brands can market their products is by turning their customers into affiliates. However, this tactic consumes more time than capital. To turn customers into affiliates, a complete campaign needs to be designed and launched that targets the relevant audience willing to become affiliates. By opening. affiliate links to general audience brands can surge their visibility which will gradually turn into revenue. While the process of turning customers into affiliates isn’t easy, it’s a great way to win brand loyal customers and go viral on digital media.
Affiliate Marketing Software Tools
Adapting to the latest affiliate marketing tools is essential to keep up with the dynamic online world. Robust affiliate marketing tools not only track customers and store their information for re-targeting; they also accelerate things and generate better results.
1. Pretty Links
This tool was specifically designed to help affiliate marketers manage link redirections. It is essential to manage your redirect because they help you look better and keep things organized. Moreover, Pretty Links prevents bad actors from modifying or poaching your affiliate links.
2. AnyTracks
AnyTracks is important if you want to expand your affiliate marketing efforts to social media sites and other platforms. This magnificent tool tracks where your clicks are coming from and integrates with Facebook Pixel. You can transfer the customer data from your affiliate website and target them through social media campaigns as well.
3. CAKE
CAKE is a relatively simpler affiliate marketing tool that optimizes your campaigns for better results. You can target a bunch of customers and add them to your affiliate marketing campaigns for niche-specific results.
The Bottom Line
Affiliate marketing is a growing field with huge potential to generate leads for businesses. 83% of marketers have used affiliate marketing to boost brand awareness, while 79% use affiliate marketing to engage with existing customers. These numbers are subjected to steam higher due to the global acceptance of online shopping. A new wave of customers is soon to surface that will rely mostly on blogs and product reviews before making a purchase.
Placing your brand in the sweet spot of affiliate marketing before it becomes crowded is like having the first movers’ advantage. This initiative to start affiliate marketing will not only boost your sales but also increase brand awareness and strengthen your relationship with existing customers.
TheArtOfHackingLife.com is a great place to kick-start your affiliate marketing journey and go forward. Follow my digital marketing blog posts to stay updated with the latest industry information and new tips and tricks about digital marketing.
