It is not all about setting up your business that matters. It is how many customers you have, how are you creating awareness of your business, and how many sales are you able to make.
With the above statement in place, this is where affiliate marketing comes in. Affiliate marketing has been proven to be one of the most straightforward ways to generate sales. With this method, you create business relationships with people who advocate for your product. They essentially do your marketing for you while you do the selling.
What’s affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing can be defined as the process of marketing a product or services of others online or by any other means. You simply get paid by the seller whenever a buyer purchases a product or service by clicking on the link of your marketing.
Read more: How to make money online
On the other hand, your business pays a 3rd-party publisher, such as a blogger, to generate leads for your company’s product or service. The 3rd-party publisher is the affiliate. The affiliate then gets paid for every sale you make to someone who clicked through from their site.
How does it work?
The affiliate uses custom tracking links, called affiliate links, that lead to a purchase page on your e-commerce site. This activity hopefully results in a sale and is associated with the affiliate whose link the customer clicked. You only pay the affiliate when someone buys something using their affiliate link.
If you begin an affiliate marketing relationship with the blogger they’ll include links to your product in a few posts. If one of the blog’s readers clicks on a link to your product’s sales page and buys your controller, the affiliate marketing system sees the link and credits that blogger with the sale. The blogger then gets a part of the proceeds.
Major Advantages of Affiliate Marketing
- Affiliate marketing has several advantages but the major advantage is of introducing your products to your target audience.
- Affiliate marketing is most effective in lead generation.
- With affiliate marketing, your costs are relatively low. Your return on investment (ROI) is high–you only pay affiliates when they generate sales.
Major Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing
- You don’t have control over the marketing of your products
- The buyer gets first-hand information about the product from the affiliate marketer instead of getting it from the seller who knows more about the products.
- It is always hard to find the right affiliate marketer.
- Affiliate marketers disclose their relationship with the product to the buyer.
