Affiliate Marketing: The Light And Dark Sides
With the development of the Internet, new forms and directions are springing up like mushrooms after the rain. Today one of these directions is affiliate marketing., What is it? How does it work?
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is one of the favorite ways companies make money online. It’s a strategy to help to increase sales and generate high income by referring users/buyers to a business’s particular product or service. In other words, if the user buys the product based on your recommendation, you receive a good commission. This marketing strategy is especially useful for bloggers who want to increase their revenue or start earning money using their blog.
Based on this data, 81% of brands and 84% of publishers in the USA use affiliate marketing strategy for the own purposes. According to this data, there is a 10.1% increase in affiliate marketing spending in the United States each year. That means by 2020, the number will reach $6.8 billion.
How Does It Work?
Affiliate marketing works by spreading the responsibilities of product marketing across parties. This system consists of the elements: seller, network, consumer, and affiliate.
- Seller
The seller is an individual or a business promoting and selling products and services in the market. Of course, the merchant doesn’t need to be involved in the marketing. However, he/she can be the advertiser or partner and get the profits associated with affiliate marketing.
- Affiliate
The affiliate is an individual who gets a commission on each sale. This specialist promotes the product to persuade consumers it is valuable or beneficial to them. Plus, the affiliate creates unique marketing campaigns with ads, links, and banners to find customers for the company services.
- Client
The consumer is the person who uses products or services to satisfy his/her needs. In affiliate marketing, when the client buys an item, the seller and the affiliate share the profits.
- Network
The network works as an intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate. It is entirely digital and requires varying levels of involvement from both the merchant and affiliate.
Each company or business strives to increase its profits by attracting more customers. Affiliate marketing is a perfect option for this. For example, you have an e-commerce store in Europe. It has a website and an excellent infrastructure for selling products through different channels. However, your current customer base is not sufficient for the business targets. To increase access to new markets and the customer base, you start a partnership program where clients commit to paying a commission for a certain sales target achieved by independent vendors who join the program. These vendors (bloggers or other marketing specialists) create websites and marketing campaigns to sell the products of your store to their customers.
The best example is the TopTenSelect website. It reviews different types of products and adds them to comparison tables and top lists. The content on this website is useful and gives the user advice on what products are worth the money.
The Good and Bad Sides of Affiliate Marketing
- In affiliate marketing programs, the marketing details are provided by the seller. In this case, if you are the blogger, you don’t need to create unique design banners or links. You simply use the content provided by the merchant on the company’s marketing channels.
- Affiliate marketing offers an easy way to find additional sources of revenue for publishers and owners. Marketing banners of sellers items create instant sales wherein they get a commission.
- Merchants get more extensive opportunities to sell goods and services, resulting in more customers and more sales.
- This approach doesn’t require a sizeable investment on the part of the affiliate.
Despite all the positive aspects, this approach also has some disadvantages.
- Sometimes, the sellers can incur high commission costs and setup and maintenance fees due to affiliate facilitators/brokers.
- Dishonest sellers are able to arbitrarily close down programs without informing the affiliates and without paying commissions.
- In most cases, sellers promise high commissions to attract new affiliates, but afterward, they can drop these rates.
How Can Business Benefit from Affiliate Marketing?
Businesses can get many advantages from investment in affiliate marketing.
Brand Awareness
Affiliates are able to secure high search engine listings and show your ads on their websites.
New customers
In most cases, affiliates provide you with great opportunities since they have a specific audience and pick the campaigns most suited to their demographic. In this way, your ads are targeted by real people.
Marketing experts
Sometimes affiliates can be great specialists in search engine marketing. They can help you get to the top of Google quickly without SEO or PPC services.
Transparency
You can see all the details about sales since a crucial point for sellers is the transparency of return on investment.
A Large Number of Programs
There are the great variety of special affiliate programs involving a web advertiser and recruited webmasters. The webmasters, as affiliates, place the company’s ads on their websites. One tool is an affiliate program created by PublBox. The program provides clear data charts, ready-made engaging posts, key performance indicators realtime, the particular interface for the user and many other useful things.
Any individual with 1000+ followers or company whose digital media gain high traffic due to high-quality design and content are welcome to apply for PublBox Affiliate Program.
Affiliate commission is 30% of referral customers lifetime payments made via the desktop version of PublBox.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective and profitable marketing tools. The seller is happy because he/she can get more sales, the affiliate is satisfied because he/she has income from each sale, and the consumers are happy because they get products without problems.
