By Arina Smith
If it hasn’t been that long since you started your business, you’re probably busy with many matters. Maybe you don’t have enough employees.
Either way, as you are now, promoting your products and services can be challenging. After all, marketing can be a costly and demanding endeavor. On the bright side, there are marketing strategies that don’t require a lot of your time and money, and one of which is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is when an individual promotes a business product and earns money for every sale they make. The affiliate deals with marketing, and the business simply provides the compensation.
Just like any other marketing strategy, affiliate marketing requires a lot of deliberation and preparation on your side. Based on this 12-minute affiliate review, you have to think of how to provide the compensation, pick affiliates, and many more. It can be overwhelming at first, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem as this article guides you through each step you must take to incorporate affiliate marketing into your business.
1. Create Promotional Materials For The Affiliates
The success of your affiliate program largely depends on your product, the affiliates, and their skills. By providing them with readily available materials to your affiliates, they should be able to rack in more sales than they’d have without these materials. Hence, before starting an affiliate program, it’s advisable to create promotional materials such as:
- Images
- Graphics
- Video
- Banners
- Testimonials
- Case studies
2. Check Your Competitors
Take note that affiliate marketers have different standards in each industry. For example, in the health niche, a 20% commission rate is standard, but in the tech niche, 10% is already high. Before setting up your own affiliate program, you must first get a feel of how your industry operates when it comes to affiliate programs. You can do so by following these steps:
- Find two or more competitors with an affiliate program.
- Look at how they structure their affiliate networks.
- Match your affiliate program with the standards.
Once you’ve done your research, you should be able to breeze through these steps. But before that, you should first create promotional materials for your affiliates.
3. Decide On A Structure
When incorporating affiliate marketing into your business, you typically have two options: (1) create a network from scratch or (2) join an existing affiliate network. The first option provides you with full control over your affiliates while the second option is the easier route. Depending on your requirements or your preferences, you have to choose from these two.
4. Choose Your Affiliates
The next step is to look for potential affiliates. They mustn’t only be skillful but also trustworthy. Here are a few questions you must ask yourself when choosing affiliates:
- Does the prospect have a platform like a website or a social media page?
- Do they create good content?
- Does their platform have good viewership?
- Are they great storytellers?
- Does their platform align with your brand rules?
Remember that this step is optional. You may also choose to offer your affiliate program to everyone with access to the link.
5. Set Up The Commission System
Once you have your affiliates, it’s time to set up the commission system. First, you have to decide the payment structure of your affiliate network. You can either provide compensation based on a percentage of the product cost or offer a fixed amount of money for every sale.
Regardless of your choice, you need to decide on the rate or the amount. For the first option, the typical commission rate is 5-30% of the product cost. For the second option, you can base it on the amount your competitors are offering.
Make sure the amount isn’t too low that it discourages affiliates from joining your program or too high that it results in a loss instead of a profit. You can also offer bonuses to improve the morale of affiliates that are doing reasonably well in promoting your products and services.
6. Select The Products To Put In The Program
Lastly, you have to select which products to put in the program. Your goal is to promote the product without putting in much effort. Hence, the ideal products to put in the affiliate program are those that are excellent yet don’t get much recognition.
Closing Thoughts
Incorporating affiliate marketing into a business can be overwhelming, especially if you don’t know much about this particular strategy. However, once you successfully set up the program, you no longer have to do anything. Sure, you can monitor the performance of your affiliates, but it’s rarely necessary.
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