How small businesses can use affiliate marketing in a profitable way

 
02/28/2020

By Nicole D. Garrison,

In order to succeed, your small business needs a steady stream of sales. What makes that even more challenging is that you often have to achieve this with the smallest staff, or even entirely on your own. To grow, you'll need to build your customer base.

It is difficult to achieve this while still handling the operational aspects of your company. In fact, many businesses are simply unable to pull it off. Fortunately, you may be able to implement an affiliate marketing strategy to significantly improve your chances of success.

What is Affiliate Marketing and What Can It Do?

When businesses work with bloggers, publishers, and influencers to advertise their products in return for a commission per sale, that is affiliate marketing. In some cases, businesses work directly with the people or companies who will be marketing their products. In most cases, small business owners will go through an affiliate network. The affiliate network then handles all transactions, and as the affiliate advertiser, you simply register your business so that publishers may link to your products.

Affiliate marketing it's not complex. When someone clicks on a link to one of your products, are taken to a landing page on your site. If they choose to make a purchase, you get the sale, and the affiliate marketer earns a small commission. Affiliate marketing has quickly become a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Why is This a Preferred Strategy for Small Business?

Jeff Willis is a marketing strategist at Studicus. He says, “Affiliate marketing is certainly not the only option you have. You can use an in-house sale staff, but that requires paying wages and benefits that you may not be ready to. You can also use paid advertising. Unfortunately, with that, you pay for clicks not sales. With affiliate marketing, you only pay for sales. That means marketers are very motivated to get their audiences excited about your product.”

Now, some strategies on that using affiliate marketing to boost sales, and increase your brand reach.

Use Affiliate Marketing to Build Trust and Credibility

When you have affiliates endorsing your products in recommending them for their followers, you earn a sort of social proof. Today, that can be a major factor in your success. Millennials and members of Gen Z tend to trust reviews and recommendations much more than advertisements. A good marketing strategy will combine trust-building, a social media marketing strategy, and other efforts to boost awareness and credibility.

Because so many affiliates incorporate affiliate links into their content by writing about their own experiences, this is a great way to earn organic support for your products. Also, affiliates have skin in the game and are motivated to be positive about their experiences.

Use Affiliate Marketing to Draw Attention to Low Sale Products

Not every product you put out there is going to be an immediate and popular seller. These products are often wonderful. They simply need to find the right audience. If you have a niche product with slow sales, this could be perfect for the right affiliate marketer. The same is true for higher-priced items that simply don’t move as often as others.

 

If you have items that fit these criteria, reach out to your affiliates. Consider offering higher payouts to bloggers and influencers who can move these goods.

Create High Converting Landing Pages

Of course, an affiliate sales strategy isn’t only about reaching out to the best affiliates to sell your products. There’s work for you to do here as well. You’ll need to create landing pages that provide potential customers with that final push to convert.

To do this, be certain that your landing page builds customer trust, further explains any benefits of converting, and provides customers with a clear visual and description of your product. To help ensure that your landing page content is spot on use tools like Grammarly, BestEssay. Education, Canva, or Grab My Essay.

Reaching Out to More Affiliates Helps You Leverage User-Generated Content

Even though Affiliate promoters are given quite a bit of leeway in how they promote your products, most choose to do it natively through their blog posts and other content. If you connect with enough affiliate marketers, it’s like you’ve gained access to volumes of user-generated content, all written in praise of your products.

Now, imagine that 10 affiliates select your products, and each of those has 10K followers. That’s 100K potentially new customers learning about your company, and what you have to offer. Even better, they’re learning from someone they trust. That’s a lot of impressions, and you pay for none of them until they make a purchase.

Show Your Affiliates That You Value Them

As you might expect, the affiliates who bring you the most customers will expect to be compensated for that. Around 10% is fairly common. But, many of the best will seek out more. You won’t keep your bestsellers around if you don’t pay them for their ability to bring you customers. Consider adding a bonus, or implementing some other program that allows you to provide additional pay for marketers who are able to exceed a predetermined threshold each month. Remember that these are the folks who work to get customers to fall in love with your business.

Final Thoughts

More small businesses are considering affiliate marketing for good reason. This strategy allows you to harness the power of capable salespeople and user-generated content, even when your staff is minimal. The key to success here is building mutually agreeable relationships with your affiliates, choosing the right products to promote, and doing your part to encourage customers to convert.

Author Bio: Nicole D. Garrison is a writer and content strategist at TrustMyPaper. In addition to this, she has also been a contributor at several sites listed in the best online essay writing services review. She is an experienced writer who is dedicated to the practice of quality research. When she has free time, Nicole enjoys distance running, and is a backyard beekeeper. In addition to this, she runs her own blog, LiveInspiredMagazine.



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