How Best to Use Affiliate Marketing to Drive Traffic, Generate Leads, and Boost Sales

Affiliate marketing is now well-established and proven as a very viable option for increasing eCommerce sales. Through it, marketers can exponentially extend the market reach of their business and effectively drive traffic to their business websites and blogs. Most marketers find affiliate marketing extremely attractive as a business model because of the low-cost and low-risk aspects of the business. This is exactly why many small business owners rely on affiliate marketing to drive traffic, generate leads and boost sales. Aside individual small business owners, even the most prominent players in the eCommerce world, such as Strong Future International SFI, ClickBank, Amazon and eBay, all have thriving affiliate programs. This is a clear testimony to the great potential of affiliate marketing for any online business.

To get a team of good affiliates, you can either source them directly yourself or you do so through a reputable agency. If your affiliate team is good, your business can benefit from excellent return on investment. This ROI is not only in sales and subscriptions but also in building brand awareness and market reach. The types of affiliates you decide to work with depend on your business aims and the kinds of products/services you are promoting. Sourcing affiliates directly is OK and can yield good results too but using agencies has an added advantage.  If you use the services of a reliable affiliate marketing agency or affiliate network, they not only provide you with pre-vetted and targeted affiliates, they also manage the transfer of links, images, logos, ads etc. etc. and handle payments as well. By doing this, it makes things easier for the business owner to get more and better managed leads and sales.
As a business owner, if you are marketing with affiliate marketing campaigns, your business has added benefits when compared to other online marketing channels. The reason is simple.
 
Affiliates are independent business persons with their own web channels and audience. This is what they bring to bear to help a business owner whose affiliates they are to widely propagate marketing messages and make sales. Most affiliates usually have good access to consumers with whom they have already established a strong and responsive trust relationship. So, when such affiliates make a personal product recommendation through their own channels particularly when such massages go out to a responsive mailing list of hundreds of thousands, the impact of such messages can be tremendous. When this happens, the conversion rate such affiliates achieve usually out-performs standard marketing techniques in terms of leads and sales. Typically, affiliate marketing not only engenders new demographics for your business, it characteristically draws many consumers to your business website or blog. That means traffic. For many marketers, affiliate marketing is one great way to build traffic and boost online presence for their business in the SERPs of search engines. This ultimately translates to good organic traffic for the business.

 

If you relate with affiliates as individual freelance marketers themselves and do business with them as such, the benefits are great. Most affiliates bring to bear on your business their high skills and tremendous experience in content marketing. Many already have their own established portfolio of websites and blogs, along with well-managed and responsive email lists. Now, these are highly valuable marketing assets affiliates lay out for affiliate marketing. With these marketing assets in place, all a business owner really needs to do is to simply provide affiliates with links to the sales pages of their specific products/services. Affiliates do their promotions using these unique links in their content. For correct and easy attribution purposes, each of these links has a tracking code embedded in it that is unique to each affiliate. When affiliates promote a product/service using these links, for each consumer they send to a product page that converts, they earn a percentage of the value of the sale as commission. The more conversions they generate, the more commission the affiliates earn. This is why affiliate marketing is a performance-based business model. Much unlike a marketing agency whom you are required to pay irrespective of whether their campaigns yield results or not, affiliates are compensated solely based on the results they generate. This is why affiliates are generally more highly motivated. How great they are doing depends on how well they are performing in their affiliate marketing activities. The reason affiliates are best suited to help businesses drive traffic, generate leads and boost sales.