The Top 5 Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

 

If you’ve been in the e-commerce space for a little while, you’re most likely familiar with the term “affiliate marketing.” But many people aren’t quite sure what it actually is or how the process works. In its simplest terms, affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing model that rewards affiliate partners for driving the desired action. These actions can include site visits, completion of a lead form, and/or converted sales. This form of marketing can be an incredibly beneficial, low-risk way to promote your products.

To help you understand the real benefits of affiliate marketing, we’ve created a list of the top 5 benefits of affiliate marketing:

*. Affiliate marketing is performance-based

The main advantage of having an affiliate program is that it is entirely performance-based. Because affiliates are only paid a commission once the desired action has taken place, they’re more motivated to drive the conversion you’re looking for. This mitigates any efforts that drive traffic with little to no value to your company while also ensuring that you get what you pay for.

*. It's cost-effective

For many of the reasons listed above, affiliate marketing can be extremely cost-effective. If you’re only paying commissions when the desired conversion occurs, you’re not throwing away ad dollars on placements that have no proven value. Furthermore, recruiting affiliates in new markets is an easy way to branch out into that market without the overhead cost of creating an entire marketing campaign, mitigating the need to sink money into an unproven market for testing.

*. Affiliates can rapidly scale your traffic (and sales)

In conjunction with your other marketing efforts, recruiting affiliates to your program will allow you to scale traffic faster. The more sites that link to your pages, the more opportunities you’ll have to convert those users into paid customers. Also, although affiliate links won't have a direct impact on your search engine rankings, it will have a 'halo effect' in terms of more people searching for your products and navigating to your pages - which IS great for your rankings. In addition to a higher level of referral traffic, you can almost always expect a boost to your direct and organic traffic as well.

The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

1. Affiliate marketing is performance-based

2. It helps broaden your audience

3. Affiliates can boost your reputation

4. It's cost-effective

5. Affiliates can rapidly scale your traffic and sales

Affiliate marketing can be a very effective, low-risk investment to help expand your marketing efforts beyond a small business’ traditional bandwidth. For the reasons listed here, affiliate marketing is almost always worth the investment and can take your online store to new heights.

Are you already utilizing affiliate marketing? How is it going? Feel free to reach out in the comments below with any questions or comments.