These Affiliate Marketing Tips Will Help You Build an Amazing Partner Program

If you’re looking to grow and scale your business, a great way is through an affiliate program. You’ve probably heard of affiliates and seen some of them at work, promoting and sharing information on the wares of other businesses. And since over 80% of brands have affiliate programs, you’re missing out if you’ve never considered it before. To help you out, we’ve put together some top affiliate marketing tips to help you succeed and hit the ground running.

Specifically, in this post you’ll learn about:

• What affiliate marketing is.
• How affiliate marketing works.
• Why you should use affiliate marketing in your business.
• Things to consider when implementing your affiliate program.
• Top tips for success with affiliate marketing.
• Affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a revenue model of someone (an affiliate partner) promoting the product or service of another retailer or marketer to their own audience and, in return, earning money or commission. In this situation, the affiliate partner is rewarded for delivering a certain outcome to you, the retailer or business. This is usually a sale, but some affiliate marketing programs offer rewards for free-trial users, website clicks, leads or app downloads – whatever the case is, it should be specified in your affiliate marketing terms and conditions.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

With affiliate marketing, your products or services are promoted or shared on your affiliate marketer’s social media sites, blog, website, podcast, or other digital platforms. Every time someone makes a purchase (or performs another action the program dictates), through a unique link tied to your partner’s shared content, they earn a commission.

In an affiliate marketing program (sometimes called partner or referral programs), there are three main parties:

1. You, the affiliate company, network, seller or creator looking to get your products or services promoted and get new customers through different networks. Why would you want this? Specific or niche audiences, whose needs, wants and pain points are known well to an affiliate marketer, are often more likely to buy than unqualified, random leads are.
2. The affiliate marketer or partner. Using digital platforms and a link unique to them, the affiliate marketer promotes and refers people to the affiliate company’s products or services. They’re then rewarded for sales made through these referrals, usually some amount of the generated revenue.
3. The customer. This is someone from the affiliate marketer’s network or audience who learns about a product or service and, using the unique affiliate link, makes a purchase or takes another action with your company. Customers may or may not be aware they bought something through an affiliate system and will receive the item in the same way that anyone buying direct from the company would.

For example, your affiliate posts a unique link or ad (tied to their name or company) for your business on their blog, social network or website. From there, a customer clicks on this link and purchases from you. The transaction gets recorded in the affiliate network and, once you confirm the sale, you pay out the affiliate marketer’s commission.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Here are just some of the main benefits of using affiliate marketing for your brand.

Low initial investment

It really doesn’t take much capital to create your affiliate marketing program. Their bread and butter is really the already-developed large social media or other following of influencers and other partners. All you really need to worry about is creating tracking URLs and creating some marketing assets that they can repurpose to attract leads.

Branch out with as many affiliate marketers as you’d like

When it comes to affiliate recruitment, there’s no need to limit yourself to just a few marketers. The more affiliates you recruit, the more access you have to larger and different audiences and creative ways for those marketers to position what you’re selling to them. The best part? You have nothing to lose since your affiliate marketers (unless you want to pay a fixed fee for content submission) aren’t rewarded until they produce some quantifiable result.

Offer flexible and varied commission models

What’s nice about affiliate marketing programs is that they offer you many options for commission payouts. Think about what works best for your business, whether that’s paying per lead, click, sale, or something else entirely. The thing about only paying per sale is you’ll know you’re getting a guaranteed result. However, if you’re looking to, say, boost exposure, pay-per-click is a great option and incentive to attract more affiliate partners.

Establish trust with new customers

Since your affiliate partners will endorse your product or service to their audience, you’re working with warm leads and a baseline level of trust. If a customer trusts your affiliate marketer that sent them to your business, they are more likely to trust you, too. And, once they’ve bought and tried what you’re offering and enjoy it, they’re more likely to become repeat customers and, if you’re lucky, even refer you themselves! At this point, you get the added benefit of direct, non-commission sales and more profit back in your business.

Affiliate Marketing Considerations

As you plan your affiliate marketing program, be sure to take the following into consideration.

Inconsistent promotions to inaccurate markets

Keep in mind that many affiliate marketers will be generating traffic for several businesses at a time and at different frequencies. And, sometimes, they will end up promoting your products or services to the wrong markets, resulting in high bounce and low conversion rates. This also means you’ll likely find it tough to forecast your affiliate marketing results. This doesn’t mean affiliate marketing isn’t worthwhile, but it does mean you should be prepared.

Vulnerable reputation

With affiliate marketing, your reputation becomes vulnerable, but you can protect it if you’re proactive in ensuring you’re working with ethical affiliates. As a precaution, be sure to do your due diligence on your affiliate partner’s marketing. It’s your business and brand on the line, so you need to be sure there is no negligent action on their part like email spamming or false advertising, for instance.

Requires patience

You’ll definitely need some patience when it comes to the audience and influence needed for effective affiliate marketing. For instance, it takes time to try and test out various channels to see which ones your affiliates’ audiences best connect with. As well, you’ll need to research the items that are most relevant and suited to your market and have affiliates promote those.

A content strategy plays a huge role in your affiliate marketing success, too. This can mean social media content, blog posts, virtual events, and other activities to generate leads and traffic. Your partners will use the content you create and tweak it to their specific platforms and followers.

Top Affiliate Marketing Tips for Success

Follow these tips for affiliate marketing, and you’ll see your business grow before you know it.

Use an affiliate marketing tool like GrowthHero

It’s easy to boost your sales and grow your business when you use an affiliate marketing tool like GrowthHero. It helps encourage your affiliates to promote your products and services. With unique links and discount codes, you can track affiliate sales and automatically create commission payouts. Plus, with GrowthHero’s referral program, affiliates can easily improve your customer retention by enticing customers to become brand ambassadors.

GrowthHero features and benefits

• Seamless onboarding. It only takes a few minutes to get set up and start creating your initial affiliate marketing program.
• Affiliate management made easy. GrowthHero lets you manage your affiliate marketers and track referrals using a unique link or discount code.
• Advanced partner portal. The tool has a powerful, customizable portal with marketing resources and event tracking analytics so you can measure your success.
• Marketing resources. With marketing resources, you can easily share media assets like photos, logos, email copy and more with your affiliate marketers so they can better promote your items.
• Campaigns. Run time-boxed campaigns to get your affiliate marketers motivated to make you more sales revenue. They get a performance bonus paid out if they reach a specific goal.
• Discount codes. You can offer discount codes and referral incentives to your affiliate marketers to make their efforts more worthwhile and, ultimately, drive sales.
• Programs and rewards. Run several deals and manage their rewards for different marketer programs.
• Easy referral registration in one click. It’s so easy for your affiliate marketers to instantly convert your customers into affiliates themselves, no extra forms needed.
• Straightforward payments. Pay your affiliate marketers via PayPal or discount codes in seconds.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to promote your affiliate program:

Make optimized landing pages for your products or services

A landing page is meant to promote a particular product or service. The reason it’s important to optimize these pages is that it promotes the things your affiliate marketers are trying to help you sell and converts traffic into paying customers. Here are some key things to consider when building your landing pages:

• Keep all content focused on your product or service, nothing else.
• Describe the benefits your item will bring to your customers. This will help them differentiate you from others in the market and feel confident that you have the best option for them.
• Include a clear, obvious CTA (call to action), which creates urgency and drives sales.

SEO (search engine optimization) is key here. When you follow SEO steps properly, like keyword research, on-page SEO, and link-building, you can gain significant organic traffic from Google and other search engines. This means ensuring your website is as user-friendly as possible, to help people find exactly what they’re looking for online.

Recruit engaged and active affiliate marketers to promote your offering

For the top sales outcomes, it’s best to get completely committed affiliates involved with your affiliate marketing program and engage with their leads and audience on a regular basis. If you find that this lacks, you can motivate them by:

• Communicating effectively with your affiliates often. This will spur them to take action and offer you clues into what they’re doing (or not doing), so you can make changes to your program or plans accordingly.
• Using an affiliate marketing tool or dashboard. A tool like GrowthHero helps you offer your affiliates resources to make their job easier, along with information on their performance and earnings.
• Providing training and tools. This will ensure your affiliate marketers know exactly what you need from them and what they can expect in return. It’s easy to provide resources and training through a newsletter or portal.

Create marketing resources for your affiliates to easily customize

The easier you make it for your affiliate marketers to work with you and earn income, the more successful you’ll be. One way to do this is to create reusable and customizable marketing assets or resources that affiliates can re-use on their platforms with a user-friendly affiliate marketing tool like GrowthHero. These tools let you create graphics, images, social media posts, brand messaging and more.

Help your affiliates build trust with their audience

When your target market believes you’re putting them and their interests first, they’re more likely to trust what your affiliate marketers recommend. To establish this, first off, you need to offer a solid, high-quality product or service, no matter what it is.

You can mandate or encourage your affiliates to only promote products that they’ve actually tried themselves and are confident their audience will find useful or otherwise enjoy. Many affiliate marketers take the wrong approach by promoting random items that don’t necessarily offer value. People will quickly catch on to this, so it’s best to encourage your affiliates to be more thoughtful and strategic in what they’re offering.

This means they need to understand the wants and needs of their audience so they’ll know what they’re promoting will in fact be valuable. Your affiliate marketers also need to know your niche and how what you offer stands out from the competition in meeting the needs of their audience. Whether it’s a unique function of a common product or a new way of using it, you’ll want to offer messaging to your marketers to help them in their work.

Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

When planning and preparing your new affiliate marketing program, watch out for these all-too-common blunders.

Accepting just anybody into your affiliate network

It might be very tempting to think and act on the notion that the more affiliates you have in your network, the more money you’ll make. After all, you might want to grow and scale as fast as you can. But, take a pause, as there are potential problems with this approach. Some affiliates might be more concerned with making as much money as possible, at the cost of recommending quality, thoughtful items to their network. This can backfire into a poor reputation for your brand. They might even resort to spamming, which will negatively affect the ranks of your pages.

Instead, think about how you can vet them to ensure they’re the right people for your team. Check if they have a quality content channel, like social media pages, a blog or a podcast, and how often it’s updated. Look at their following and consider if that audience is your target market. Ask thoughtful questions, and maybe even check references.

Offering non-competitive commission rates to your affiliates

You want quality, reputable affiliates and, by the same token, those affiliates deserve to be paid fairly for their hard work. If you make the program worth their while, you’ll find those good at their job will stick with you. Plus, with so many programs out there to choose from, you need to set yours apart from the competition and give affiliate marketers a reason to work with you above others. Slightly above average commissions and bonuses on some sales can work very well.

Disengaging from your affiliate partners

When you keep in regular contact with your affiliates, they’ll feel more engaged, informed, comfortable and, overall, happier working with you. Whether through Slack or text message, social media, newsletters, or meetings, you’ll both have a chance to voice any issues that arise and make any requests. You’ll also get a better sense of what their audiences need and want and can then act on feedback quicker than simply standing by the sidelines, guessing. Above all, communication simply fosters a healthier working relationship and encourages a long-term partnership.

Now that you’ve learned some tips and tricks for your brand’s affiliate marketing, you’ll be equipped to create an amazing partner program. Keeping these things in mind as you go forward will help you work well with great affiliate marketers so you can grow and scale your business for the long run.