8 Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

If you are looking to bring in a team of marketers to promote your brand and products at a very low cost, then affiliate marketing is the solution. A wide range of online businesses have partnered with thousands of affiliates that promote their products and offers for a commission – and Amazon.com is one good example of this. It hosts its own affiliate programme and affiliates earn a commission for each sale that they drive to Amazon.
Affiliates run the gamut from small blogs that receive a few thousand visitors each month to large portals and websites like Moneysupermarket that receive millions of visitors each month that lead to high sales volumes for merchants.
It has many advantages and here are 8 that should help you decide if it is right for your business:

1. SERPs Visibility

Affiliate marketing helps your site appear higher and more often in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in two main ways: Firstly, you get many backlinks to your website from affiliate publishers who place links on their sites to yours and this improves your rankings in the organic natural search results. Each backlink is like a vote for your site and the more votes you have, especially if they are of higher quality, then the higher you will be listed for your keywords.

Secondly, for affiliates that use pay per click advertising to promote your business or products, you will appear for more searches, especially for searches that you haven’t identified earlier. However, you should have rules in place that prevent affiliates from bidding on your brand name, domain name and any close variants.

2. Reach different audiences

You can use affiliates to target different target audiences that your current online campaigns aren’t targeting. So, your affiliates can promote specific products or categories that are not targeted in your existing campaigns and advertising.

3. Responsiveness to market changes

Affiliates are often more responsive to industry changes in SEO and other tactics than in-house and agency teams and they have the skills to implement these changes. They are also quicker in identifying gaps in your PPC strategy and will identify long tail searches that could be very profitable.

4. Target generic phrases

It allows you to target generic phrases like ‘shoes’ that are hard to rank for in the organic results. This is especially the case if you are working with large affiliates like Kelkoo that have high rankings for their comparison shopping engines.

5. Increase reach in search engines

It increases your reach because third party sites will list your products through datafeeds that are automatically updated with your latest offers.

6. Generate awareness

If your brand is not well known, affiliates can help to increase awareness through banners and ads that they place on their sites. So, a site that receives thousands of visitors each month from people who are interested in what you sell, will help generate awareness for your brands and lead to click-through and ultimately to more sales.

7. Diversify risk

Like other advertising types, online advertising is risky and there are upfront costs to run campaigns. However, affiliate marketing helps to reduce that risk, because part of the responsibility of promoting your business and products is passed on to affiliates who foot the costs of promoting your products and business.

8. Pay-per-performance

This is perhaps the biggest advantage of affiliate marketing because you only pay a commission for the sales that affiliates drive and there are no advertising costs. Promotion in this case is the responsibility of affiliates and they bear the costs of advertising and marketing your products. So it’s easier to control costs and you set a pay-per-sale rate that is affordable for your business. If you sign up with an affiliate network like Commission Junction, all billing and payments are handled by the network and that saves you a lot of time and money too.

Summary

Need help launching an affiliate program in-house using third-party software or on an affiliate network? Contact me to discuss how I can help you launch your affiliate marketing campaigns and also recruit super affiliates that will promote your business and products and increase your sales.