Using Affiliate Marketing as Part of Your Online Marketing Strategy
Do you own a website and are looking for ways to drive traffic to you site and increase sales? If so, joining an affiliate network as an advertiser may be a good option for you. As you have probably found, most articles out there about affiliate marketing are for publishers, or those promoting other sites for some kind of compensation. This article though is geared towards those website owners looking to use these “affiliates” to promote their product or service.
When it comes down to it, there are four main ways to drive traffic to your website: search engine optimization, pay-per-click, joining an affiliate network and social media. Each of these methods have their own pros and cons, but I will focus on the main benefit and cost of what joining an affiliate network can do for your business. First things first though, let me list for you some of the affiliate networks out there that you could join:
- Commission Junction
- LinkShare
- Pepperjam
- AffiliateBOT
- Clixgalore
- Shareasale
- Google Affiliate Network
- Clickbank
- and much more…
The downside to signing up with an affiliate network is the ongoing cost and performance standards required. If your plan is for visitors to your site to make a purchase and your site converts well, then you may not have a lot to worry about. However, this can get very expensive very fast and eventually get you kicked off the network if you are not converting traffic to sales.
The upside to joining an affiliate network is that you have the possibility of having an army of marketers across the web market your product or service. Remember that your commission structure must be attractive to these marketers for them to show interest. Even though there are a lot of affiliates out there, it seems that only a few really know how to market well on the web. You either need to search them out and make them an offer or look for affiliate sites within your niche where you could promote your product.
The most successful sites that use affiliate marketing as a strategy have at the very least an affiliate manager hired from within. These managers may perform such tasks as communicating with affiliates, approve/deny affiliate applications, create creative ad content and copy for affiliates to use, create landing pages, perform split testing to see what pages are converting best, create email drip campaigns, manage email lists, etc. So obviously you either need a very talented affiliate manager or a team that may consist of a marketing manager, web developer, graphic designer, writer and analyst.
If you are looking to use affiliate marketing as part of your online marketing strategy, I hope this has answered some questions for you. Still have questions or would like to talk more about this? You can contact me here or leave a comment below.
