Together with email marketing, affiliate marketing has become the largest source of online income besides being a profitable marketing tool. Whether you want to monetize your web presence or to start a business online, you need to learn more about affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a partnership in creating and marketing products providing contributors with a share of the profit. Affiliate marketing implies a sum of factors: the seller/the product creator + the affiliate/the advertiser + the network + the consumer. Each factor plays an important role and they couldn't operate one without the other.
The role of the seller is to create a product to sell and start marketing it. As a seller you need to consider affiliate marketing to contribute to your success in generating online income by driving sales. Each year there is an increase of 10,1% in investments in the US, which will reach 6.8 million $ by 2020. This is justifiable since 16% of all orders happen through affiliate marketing. To be a part of this world, sellers must have valuable products for buyers and attractive offers for affiliates.
The role of the affiliate is to persuade the consumer to buy the product by promoting it in exchange of a portion of the revenue. Affiliates make money without actually selling a product. Affiliate marketers can be paid according to different degrees of performance. They can either receive a percentage of every generated sale, a sum based on the conversion of leads or one based on the increase of web traffic.
The role of the network is to join sellers and advertisers in the same place. This makes selection and remuneration easier as the network provides a database for each side to choose from and a tracking and payment system that makes everything transparent and secure by automatically tracking sales and clicks and by calculating commissions for each affiliate.
The role of the consumer is the most important one. The buyers have the greatest contribution to the partnership between sellers and affiliates because without them everything would be in vain. It all happens for them and because of them. Customers are in search of products, they analyse different offers, they take action and make a purchase.
All of this is crucial for the sellers as their created product reaches the purpose of its existence and for the affiliates, too, as they receive revenue for their contributions to the whole process.
Why make use of affiliate marketing to promote your online courses
Affiliate marketing is in continuous growth with an approximate worth of 12 billion $ and representing 16% of all e-commerce sales in the US. Since an online course is not a physical product that you can put on a shelf but something that can only be profitable in the realm of e-commerce, any online entrepreneur should know a thing or two about affiliate marketing and harness its powers to increase sales.
The most important aspect in terms of revenue is traffic, which can be generated through social networks, blogging, email marketing and various other channels. Affiliates seek organic traffic since it drives more sales because organic visitors are 5.66 times more likely to convert. For instance, if you have a blog where you write about relevant topics related to your online course, you might attract quite a number of affiliates thanks to the constant provision of valuable content that triggers organic traffic.
Optimization is also an essential factor because in this way there won't be a need for more posts or campaigns to have the expected results and, thus, the whole process will be less time-consuming. Both affiliates and sellers need to optimize their websites or landing pages not only for search engines, but for users as well. Also, it’s imperative to have a mobile adapted design since 51% of visitors are more likely to purchase from a mobile friendly site.
Tips to follow in the affiliate world
- Sellers should give great incentives for affiliates and the best offers for customers.
- Marketers should choose to promote products they believe in because it’s easier and more straightforward.
- Everyone should address a specific audience to be able to stay true to who they are and what they know.
- Both sellers and affiliates should study the demand on the market of a specific product and then choose whether to promote and sell it.
- Affiliate marketers should promote products from different sellers, making comparisons with other projects so as to show objectivity and build a relationship with the customers based on transparency and equity.
- Everyone should keep up-to-date with trends in affiliate marketing, networks and strategies used for promoting products and services.
- Affiliates should build an affiliate website if they don't already have one they have been using, like blogs.
- Affiliates have to leverage social networks since there they can market for free and communities are a source of potential customers.
- Sellers need to choose the best affiliates from the affiliate marketing networks, like influencers and bloggers, because they already have followers over whose decisions they can have great impact and it’s easy to direct them to convert through social media platforms.
Conclusion
Whether you find yourself on one side or the other of the seller-affiliate partnership, remember that any work process takes time to show its results. You won't make money overnight considering the fact that the degree of performance of affiliate marketing is of 1% conversion rate. But don't give up because this type of marketing is on-growing and by following the tips mentioned above you'll become more visible and you'll have great revenue. Persistence is key!
