How to Leverage Affiliate Marketing to Increase Conversions and Sales

If you run an eCommerce store, there is no doubt you contend with many issues daily trying to satisfy the increasing number of people who now find it more convenient to shop online. Now, that can be a very huge challenge at times trying to surmount the many obstacles relating to how to effectively position your products in the market to make sales. How exactly do you tackle real obstacles relating to how to position a given product before the precise audience? This is where affiliate marketing becomes very handy to help remove some marketing barriers and effectively grow customer reach. By being conversant with how affiliate marketing and advertising networks work, you can leverage this knowledge to increase conversions and sales for your eCommerce business.

 

Ecommerce store owners effectively leverage affiliate marketing to promote their products better and to a wider audience. They consequently make more conversions and sales as a result. From experience and because of the peculiarities of the Internet, what works most, however, is localized and personalized product promotion. This is exactly where a partnership between eCommerce store owners and affiliate marketers becomes highly profitable. Because of the tremendous influence most affiliates have on their audience, affiliates are the real drivers of campaign optimization and local targeting.

You may wish to ask, how does that relationship work? Just factor in that influencers, bloggers, content marketers and website owners as credible and effective affiliates. The main function of the affiliate is to promote products to consumers and to entice them to buy. Affiliates get paid commissions each time a consumer takes a desired action or buys products via the direct promo action of the affiliate. The more of affiliate efforts, the more products are sold and the more products sellers/eCommerce store owners make sales. The more products sellers leverage on this relationship therefore, the more sales they make.

When eCommerce store owners leverage effectively on this relationship, below are some of the direct benefits that accrue to their business.

1.    They can widen their brand awareness and business reputation.
2.    They can effectively drive repeat sales.
3.    They can generate the right leads to their websites.
4.    It helps them to keep track, control and measure their marketing progress/success.
5.    It is cost-effective and gives them real value for money since it is performance-based.

However, as a rule of thumb, as an eCommerce store owner, before you decide on which affiliates to work with, you must first decide which products you are going to promote and what results you expect. This will serve as your offer. It is what is on offer that will attract individual marketers/affiliates depending on their niche/products preferences.

How to Identify Your Primary Content Marketing Objective

Content marketers use content for a variety of purposes such as attracting website visitors, increasing engagement on social media, and growing email lists. Any content created without a primary objective is usually not very effective. So, before creating content, you must take into consideration your primary objective. Doing so helps to prepare the ground for you to create content that can significantly help you to accomplish this objective. You know why? Different types of content usually work to generate different results. It is therefore worth the while to clearly identify your main objective(s) right from the outset before you create the type of content that will help you achieve it. 

Below are popular marketing objectives engaging the attention of content marketers that you can make one or more primary objective(s).
More website visitors
Reduce bounce rates
Reduce abandoned carts
Increase website engagement
More traffic
Higher social media engagement
Increase brand awareness
Increase brand authority
Grow your email list
Grow your social media audience
Convert more visitors into leads
Attract more backlinks
Make more sales
Run a PR campaign
Improve your Search Engine Optimization, SEO

These are just a few of the many objectives you may have for creating your content. You must put them into consideration before creating your content marketing strategy. That is about the only way you can be sure to create the right kind of content to achieve your primary objective(s).

Why Content Marketing is more than Content Creation and Distribution

As expert marketers like to say, content marketing is much more than creating and distributing online content. It involves many techniques and strategies needed to get good content out there on the internet with the primary aim of attracting traffic to your website. The higher the traffic coming to your website, the better your chances of getting leads and sales! This is one of the inbound marketing tactics marketers really depend on to acquire leads. To generate revenue therefore, you need to do more content marketing campaigns than just mere content distribution which does not have that capability. Much more than mere content distribution, for a content marketing campaign to be successful, it must serve as a veritable and effective hub for attracting web visitors. That is the much needed web traffic by all marketers.

With search engine optimization, SEO, content marketing tends to be better placed on the web to attract the attention of search engines. Content distribution without SEO, does not have this advantage. The reason it is not searched and as such does not attract the much needed traffic by marketers. Therefore, optimizing online content with a clear goal in mind is always in the top priority list of any good marketer. Not doing so simply makes your content a merely distributed content without online promotional boost by search engines.

Content marketing directly targets traffic using inbound marketing strategies to attract, engage and delight your audience. Content distribution lacks this capacity because it is deficient of optimization techniques which will get search engines to rank and send traffic its way. This is clearly why content marketing is much more than just creating and distributing online content. To successfully market any content online, every marketer must strongly rely on his strategic and creative thinking skills. With that, you can always look at your content as is being viewed and used, then do things to enhance those goals no matter which marketing channel your audience is using. Content distribution does not require such technicalities, one more reason it is different from content marketing.

In content marketing, marketers know that their web visitors must reach them via their websites by using special keywords and searches to find answers to their web search inquiries. This is why marketers need to use the right keywords/phrases in the product descriptions on their websites. By using such keywords/phrases, you can start by optimizing your campaigns around solutions to search inquiries. Using inbound marketing strategies/tools, it is fairly easy to convert these web visitors to leads and even loyal customers by way of deliberate processes. Content marketing uses these processes to take web visitors through a buyer’s journey to become customers. This is something content distribution doesn’t have to bother about at all. A very clear difference, no doubt.

Lucrative Career Options in Digital World

Many keep walking around looking for gainful employment elsewhere whereas in our digital world, there are unlimited opportunities to earn a decent living doing legitimate work online. The good news is that as at today, there is hardly any aspect of our lives that isn’t - in one way or another - influenced, impacted, or driven by digital technologies and tools. Ranging from such mundane everyday tasks as buying groceries to business processes to how we network and connect with our social peers, the opportunities are truly unlimited. Almost all things big and small we routinely do are being completely redefined in the wake of rapid digital adoption and usage. With growing digital connectivity and ease of use, there appears to be some steady evolution driven by digital technology affecting the way we now do business.  Clearly, that is what creates the lucrative opportunities for everyone to get in the groove of doing business online. 


 
These here career options are available if you too are looking to make your name and a career in high-growth and high-tech digital space.

Digital Marketer

Out there in digital space, brands are constantly in need of other persons to oversee their end-to-end marketing strategy by bringing together individual campaigns to ensure a maximum RoI for their business. This is where a digital marketer with cross-functional domain knowledge finds real relevance. When such a person has a working knowledge of the latest trends, developments, and strategies in high-impact business segments such as affiliate marketing, his relevance becomes really essential to brands. This is because such working knowledge enables digital marketers to leverage on many marketing channels to deliver better business outcomes for brands. Exactly why many businesses are constantly on the lookout for individuals with relevant competencies in the digital marketing space and are willing to pay good money to get the best digital marketing talent to help market their brands!

Data Professional
 
To be a data professional, you need both technical knowledge and critical thinking capabilities which you require to be able to visualize associations between seemingly disparate datasets to identify hidden value. One great skill no doubt! Data professionals remain in high demand in the digital marketing space because of their ability to read, understand and use massive volumes of data deployed for utmost effectiveness in digital marketing campaigns. Many data professionals also have the skills for building models and algorithms needed to help crunch through very huge data/available information for planning and marketing purposes.

Digital Media Influencers

These are real content marketers who ply their trade in digital media world. Anyone who has the talent for creating engaging user-generated content, likes to engage/interact with people over the digital medium can become an influencer. By routinely and habitually dishing out personalized and authentic content, influencers tend to hold a lot of sway over their target audiences. That is exactly why many brands are always seeking out partnership opportunities with influencers to maximize returns from the unlimited exposure for their brands which influencers can bring about. Influencer content can be text-based, pictorial, video, or a combination of all three for maximum effects on the audience. By placing this content on the right platforms, particularly social media, you can then work towards building your digital presence real good. Doing so, will enable you to earn unlimited revenues through ad streaming and brand associations.