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Build your business around Affiliate Marketing for Companies!
This article will discuss the often ignored yet most crucial idea around affiliate marketing. That is to build a proper scalable, legit, and lasting business doing affiliate marketing for companies. Yes, you read it right! I am talking about building a business not making quick money using shoddy techniques that don’t last long.
Before you go ahead, a caveat first, this article is not about affiliate offers and cheeky ways to promote them. Internet is full of such gurus and their blogs and videos that teach you to make millions with unethical and often illegal practices with affiliate marketing. So if you are willing to perceive affiliate marketing for the purpose it is invented for and explore its real potential, then this post should fascinate you.
What is affiliate marketing, and how does it work?
Affiliate marketing is a specialized sales promotion strategy where brands collaborate with individual marketers (like bloggers, YouTubers, other content creators, and social media influencers) to increase product sales. Many companies use affiliate marketing as a dominant sales strategy, but it is particularly popular with the brands selling digital products because of its easy deliverability and unlimited scalability.
Affiliates earn a commission for leveraging their content and influence. It is a monetary payoff for their marketing efforts. So essentially, if you want to build a business around affiliate marketing for companies, then marketing is your business model, and product quality, delivery, after-sales services, etc., are not your headache. How cool is that? How best you should do this, I will elaborate in this article.
Can any company do affiliate marketing?
Yes, any company can do affiliate marketing irrespective of its size and niche. It needs to create a lucrative program and either offer it through its website or through various marketplaces that exist for the purpose.
What are the different types of affiliate marketing?
Most merchants will pay an affiliate to generate sales; others pay you for sending them leads. At the same time, there are few like Grammarly who simultaneously run both offers.
How to become an affiliate marketer?
Ideally, you should have a traffic drawing website or social media account. You can easily take relevant links from various affiliate marketplaces like Clickbank and ShareASale. Just start leveraging your content by promoting products, it is that simple, but the real task is to build targeted traffic.
Understand affiliate marketing from the companies’ perspective
Many companies in virtually every industry and niche seek partners to sell their well-crafted products. They have spent a good chunk of money on product development and brand building. Such merchants have established methods and channels to collect a payment, deliver the product, and give after-sale service or honor warranties and guarantees. Some of them have well-entrenched logistics and supply chains and a set of distributors and retailers too. For such businesses, scaling up the sales is the only way to earn maximum from their product designing and branding efforts and investment.
Traditionally, companies relied on paid promotions to maximize sales. However, with maturing of media and audience, advertisement space is getting competitive and expensive by the day, so the tilt towards affiliate marketing is logical and understandable.
Affiliate marketing for companies is a way to minimize their often hefty advertising expanse and share a percentage of profit with the facilitator of additional sales. They are more than happy to do that with affiliates because payments are tied to performance. If affiliates generate ten sales in a month, they get commission on ten sales, similarly no sales, no commission. This arrangement is unlike advertisement expense, which is always upfront and not necessarily profitable.
Understand Affiliate marketing from the affiliate marketer’s perspective
For affiliates, affiliate marketing is a way to work for themselves with virtually no risks. The cost of setting up the business is minimum, and time and effort are the only significant investments in the process. with persistent effort, individuals can build a company that they can proudly own. Affiliate marketing is primarily an online business model; hence it’s naturally scalable. The payoffs can be exponential with time as the business grows.
Interested Affiliates are required to apply to suitable affiliate programs offered by different companies. Usually, some companies approve them, and some reject them depending upon the criteria companies have to select their sales partners.
Once you are selected, it means you have read and agreed to all the terms and conditions of the program. Now you have a legally valid contract with the company for earning a preset amount or percentage of money based on your performance in increasing their sales or leads.
Initially, new aspirant affiliates may see more rejection than selection, but losing heart over teething troubles is pointless. Still, there are so many good options out there that everyone who tries will find some decent programs to promote on their content channels.
Why affiliate marketing has unmatched appeal?
Many of us are disillusioned and frustrated with our current jobs or the lack thereof. Most of us want to build some enterprise, but the costs, combine with the risk factors, are a potent deal breaker. People in such situations often look for online opportunities to earn full-time or support them with a secondary income. There are plenty of options online, but affiliate marketing for companies is potentially the most workable solution for those who want to build their enterprise without risking their capital and existing jobs.
There are three parties involved in the process of affiliate transaction, the merchant who has the product, the affiliate marketer who has the audience, and the consumer who is looking for the right product to purchase. This business model fulfills the need of all of them. That is what makes doing affiliate marketing for companies a successful business model.
An aspiring entrepreneur can start affiliate marketing part-time and slowly build up the business. All it takes is devoting weekends or a couple of hours every day, and cumulative effort can yield excellent results in weeks and months ahead. The upfront cost is minimum and often as low as hosting a WordPress website or starting a free Youtube or Instagram business account.
In this article, I won’t be talking about the process of hosting and designing an affiliate website or building a social channel around it. It is beyond the scope of discussion in focus, and there are enough excellent tutorials online that can guide you through the process. Sure, there is a learning curve in the process, but if you are reading this blog post, I have reasons to believe you are inspired to do the hard work. This article is all about giving you conceptual clarity and the grandeur of the opportunities ahead of you.
How to start affiliate marketing?
As I have asserted earlier, marketing is the business model for affiliates, and marketing is all about fulfilling consumer needs affordably and satisfactorily. So an affiliate needs to pitch themselves as a potent solution provider to target a well-defined audience having a specific problem.
Like any other business, targeting also holds special significance in affiliate marketing. First and foremost, an affiliate marketer should know its audience and its content’s market. Because if you target everybody, that means you target nobody. And without targeted traffic, it’s hard to sell anything, especially affiliate products.
An affiliate needs consistent target organic traffic for lasting success. So, content is king adage should be the mantra for wannabe affiliates as nothing draws free target traffic and social engagement like valuable and problem-solving content. Therefore an aspiring affiliate needs to build quality content to serve a well-defined niche or possibly a micro-niche(sub-niche).
It’s a mindset game!
Creating content and audience following on any channel, be it youtube, Instagram, or a blog, is time-consuming but worth the effort. The initial hard work is where most people stumble and develop cold feet. Some start following scammy techniques promising the moon, while others drop the idea of affiliate marketing altogether. But remember, like any other business, building a real business around affiliate marketing for companies requires a systematic approach. Patience and hard work would not seem unreasonable if appropriately viewed.
Think of any regular business before making any sales and profit what you need to do with your brick and mortar store. You rent or buy a shop, lease some equipment and inventory, hire staff, bear operational expenses, and market your business. Then after a few months of effort, you start getting some sales traction. Compare this to what you need to build a blog or a video channel with focussed content. Both time and effort are much lesser in the latter, and the probability of making big money is much higher.
Your job is relatively straightforward if you already have content and a target audience who love to consume your content because building traffic is the most time-consuming and effort-intensive part of the matrix. In this scenario, you need to find the right match of complementary affiliate products and services that can work well with your content and audience. Relevant companies, even the bigger ones, will quickly approve you and share their affiliate links with you to promote their products.
Where to access affiliate programs?
There are tones of individual brands offering quality affiliate or partner programs from their websites themselves. All you need is to do a cursory google search to find a list of top affiliate merchants in their niche. Then evaluate each one of them to find the right match. Another more traditional way is to go to affiliate marketplaces where hundreds of merchants list their affiliate offers. You can easily find commission details, historical conversion rates, banners, links, or even videos to promote an almost endless inventory of products.
Some of the popular affiliate marketplaces are listed below:
- ShareASale
- Clickbank
- Commission Junction
- Partnerstack
- ImpactRadius
- Refersion marketplace
- Awin
- Rakuten
- Amazon Affiliate Program
- Avangate
- JVZOO
Before getting confused and overwhelmed by the option at hand, be mindful that one only needs a handful of companies to build affiliate businesses around them. First, one needs to register with a few or most of the affiliate networks above. Then one must diligently filter out the unwanted programs and shortlist the most desirable matches to apply to each one of them.
Don’t expect every merchant to immediately welcome you to their partner program, especially as a beginner. Some will ask you a reason to approve an application and allow later after getting satisfied, while others will reject your application but don’t get disheartened. It’s a part of the process.
Another important caveat that I would like to mention is that newbies must avoid the lure of high commission rates and waste their time setting shops around poor products. No aspiring business should bank on low saleability products having high return ratios. After all, there is a reason such merchants are offering astronomical commission rates.
In case you need an affiliate marketing mentor!
All the marketplaces mentioned above have their merits and demerits. Some are easy to join, like Clickbank, whereas some like ShareaSale, offer high-quality, vetted merchants providing quality products. I strongly recommend going for high-quality merchants and products only. As a thumb rule, don’t promote a brand if you are not convinced of its quality and usability.
And for those who find hosting and building a website with quality content and finding the right merchants an overwhelming task and feel they need step by step hand holding then there is one great resource and all-encompassing marketplace in wealthy affiliates.
This company will charge you a nominal monthly fee, help you host a great affiliate business with micro-level guidance, and would save you the long learning curve of doing things right. On their platform, one can easily host multiple affiliate marketing websites in various niches and even micro niches. They have developed a very effective method of training beginners for affiliate business. Many people have built a six-figure business on their platform but again they will show you the way, guide you at turns but hard work is still yours. One disclosure WorthyMBA is a proud affiliate of wealth affiliates.
Is it too late to join the party?
It may seem that it is too late to start a business around affiliate marketing as there are already thousands, if not more, who are doing it with varying degrees of success. But it would help if you considered a few facts.
Internet is expanding exponentially and is still far from its peak potential. In other words, more and more people are getting online to search for information, looking for products and services of their choice. The explosion of affordable smartphones, ever-increasing speed, penetration of broadband and mobile internet technologies, and the increasing confidence and comfort of the general population in using digital payments for online purchases are all very inspiring factors.
Now think of technologies on the anvil, as the internet of things, 3d printing, 5g mobile technology, and satellite internet, and add them into the scheme of things. All these inputs can revolutionize online activities even further. The golden age of online businesses and their charm is far from over. In a nutshell, many new smaller, medium, and even prominent brands will keep coming offering lucrative affiliate programs and looking for potential partners who can increase their sales and take their pie from their profits.
Conclusion:
Building an enterprise around affiliate marketing for companies is one of the most viable and scalable money-making business models on the internet. It has enough juice left for any hardworking online entrepreneur to profit from it. Whether you take the plunge yourself or work under mentorship, you have a fair chance at success. The only requirement is to follow a roadmap and consistently build a brand marketing other brands.
Kartikay Ungrish is the Founder-director of Worthy Education Academy & Worthy Financial Services. He is a UGC NET-qualified Assistant Professor of Management, A MBA, a licenced mutual fund distributor, and a financial advisor. He helps people build wealth through prudent investments in mutual funds and other financial products. Start by creating your free wealth management account with him as your financial advisor. Contact for more details.
