About Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry and majority of it comes from influencers in the United States. Its demand is growing exponentially due to its reliability to increase business profits despite economic conditions.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a type of marketing based on an Influencer’s performance. Influencers are paid for driving traffic or sales to brands websites. Influencers promoting brands are referred to as Affiliates. The Affiliate’s job is to generate clicks, leads, and/or sales for Advertisers. These Advertisers can be referred to as publishers, partners, Enterprises, Merchants, or Brands. Ultimately, the Advertisers are the ones that pay commissions to Affiliates for driving traffic to their company’s websites.
How do Affiliates get paid?
Affiliates usually are required to own a website or social property. This is important to have so the Affiliate can promote the Advertiser’s brand in a way that can be tracked. This trackable link is referred to as an Affiliate Link. Each Affiliate is provided a unique link and are commonly used in either a blog post, coupon page, product review, banner advertisement, product comparison portal, email campaigns, and social media channels. When the Affiliate displays their unique affiliate link and a Consumer (someone clicking the link with an intent to buy) is led to the Advertiser’s webpage and makes a purchase the Affiliate receives a commission on that sale.
Affiliates commission?
Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based marketing model. Commission payments are made based off whatever the agreed conversion action is and this would be specified in the Affiliate agreement that establishes the partnership. These conversion actions are referred to as “conversion events” and can be anything like a product sale, a newsletter sign-up, or an account registration. Payments structures typically are in the form of cost-per-action (CPA), cost-per-click (CPC), or cost-per-lead (CPL).
It used to be that Affiliates were only paid when they generated the click that guaranteed the sale. Now, many enterprises allow payouts to be customized and Affiliates can negotiate which conversion events compensate- and how.
Alternative conversation events goals could be any of the following:
First click to Site: 100% of the conversion attributed to the first touchpoint
Last click to Site: 100% of the conversion attributed to the last touchpoint
Coupon code attribution: 100% of the conversion is assigned to the affiliate linked to a coupon code.
Linear: Every touch points on the conversion path shares equal credit.
Time Decay: touch points which are more recent in time to the conversion gets most credit.
There is no perfect conversion model. It all depends on the product and the affiliate. Having options to choose is always the better way to go.
Why Businesses Create Affiliate Programs
Enterprises are realizing the value Affiliates bring to the customer journey and so this flexibility and diversification of payments allows Affiliates to be paid in moving a customer to a sale- whether through awareness, engagement, first click, or last click.
Affiliate Marketing is favored because of the various ways it helps brands creates awareness among new audiences, significantly helps grow revenue, its low-risk and high growth rate for all parties involved.
Types of Affiliate Partners
There are many different types of Affiliate Partners and each Partner type engages with the customers at different stages of the consumer journey. An example is a social media influencer can raise awareness to a brand in the beginning of the journey but a coupon publisher can help close the sale at the end of it.
Here are the most common types of Affiliate Partnerships:
Content partner- creates content that tells its audience about a brand product or service.
Coupons and deals- the partner promotes a brand by offering discount codes or highlighting promotional deals
Mobile-app Affiliate – The partner uses their app to drive traffic to a brand’s website/app.
Email Marketer- The partner engages with its email audience to promote a brand Social media influencers and communities- These partners use social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube to tell their audience about a brand.
Directories – These partners have data-feed driven websites and usually surface product or price comparisons.
Loyalty, rewards, and cashback – These partners give consumers a cut of their affiliate commissions in the form of cashback or loyalty rewards.
Paid search affiliate – The partner bids on paid search terms to drive traffic to a brand’s website.
Pay-per-call partners: These partners prompt consumers to call a brand. The brand tracks the calls and accordingly awards the partners credit
Toolbars – Toolbar partners have browser extensions that allow consumers to apply promo codes or automatically check for cashback.
Vloggers – Video bloggers promote a brand in their video blogs. Examples include product unboxings or product video reviews.
B2B- Brands may partner with other brands to form strategic brand-to-brand partnerships.
What is an Affiliate Network?
An Affiliate Network are popular because it does majority of the work for the advertisers. Advertisers contact networks first because it gives them access to a pool of affiliates in one location. Affiliate Networks makes it easy to find relevant affiliates and simplifies the onboarding process for all parties involved. They are also beneficial for assistance with program management.
What is an Affiliate Management Program?
An affiliate management program facilitates the process or system a brand creates to manage an affiliate marketing relationship. Brands create and manage programs for affiliates to join and affiliate managers connects the two. This includes assistance with recruitment, onboarding, contracts, payments, and sharing opportunities. Each affiliate program has its own set of terms and conditions. With Google’s announcement to remove the use of third- party cookies have posed as a major threat for Digital marketing professionals in any industry.
The risk of losing major dollars due to inefficient tracking methods is inevitable unless the Affiliate has a strategy in place to prevent this. Community Builder’s cookieless software for tracking not only allows marketers to realize more accurate contributions but ensures that each Affiliate is remaining updated and compliant to with proper data use attributed by recent legal changes since the release of the death of third-party cookies.
Considering Becoming an Affiliate Marketer? Here are some things to consider to become an Affiliate.
Are you patient?
Do you have a reputation to protect?
Do you have an online presence as a Professional?
Do you want to make residual income?
Do you know how to create content?
Do you know how to tell compelling stories?
Does your audience respect the information you present?
If you believe you are ready to answer the questions above confidently and want to take a stab at Affiliate Marketing apply to join Community Builders Affiliate network. Our brand relationships with award-recognized Affiliate programs is always looking for professionals with positive brand images to promote their products. We would be interested in working with you to see what ways we can get you increasing your income and increasing economic value today. If you are a business who wants to create an Affiliate Marketing program, you can contact us too. We can help you as well.
