You’re starting a business or you may have one. But you don’t have the money to spend on marketing. What should you do? Today, I’ll explain how you can leverage Affiliates.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is simply performance based marketing. If someone drives you a lead or a sale, you pay them out. You pay them on a cost per acquisition. Acquisition can be a lead or a sale for you. You determine whatever it is. And you can even determine what you want to pay people.
1. Work Out How Much to Pay
If your service sells for £495 and your margin on it is £295 – in essence you’re operating at a 59.60% margin – and if you decide you’re willing to pay someone roughly 10% for every sale they drive you, then you can offer affiliates “Hey for every sale you drive me, I’m going to give you £50”.
And they may decide that they’re going to drive these sales through website design, Pay Per Click, LinkedIn or Facebook advertising or SEO. Whatever it may be. And that’s up to them. It’s as simple as that.
Check your competitors
The next thing you need to do is check out all your competitors campaigns. So go to their websites, look for their affiliate pages and see what they’re offering. You ideally want to try to at least match, if not beat that. If your numbers don’t work out where you can beat it, then of course you know give a lower commission to your affiliates.
But remember the last thing you want to do is be willing to pay someone £50 per sale when it costs them £100. Because if it costs someone £100 to drive you a sale, they’re not going to take £50. That means they’re going to be losing money. Especially if you’re making thousands of pounds. You have to be competitive.
Net 30
And when you’re paying out the money for these sales, pay on Net 30 terms. Basically, you only pay the affiliate 30 days after the sale is made. This is because sometimes you’ll get refunds or credit card fraud. You don’t want to give out payouts to affiliates for clients who you’re refunding.
So to ensure that you’re not getting ripped off by these affiliate marketers, make sure your payouts are on Net 30 terms.
2. Optimise your Landing Pages
The second thing you need to do to continually optimise your landing pages. If your affiliates are driving traffic, but those clients aren’t converting into customers, that means they’re either driving irrelevant traffic or it means that your landing page isn’t converting. More often that not, it’s your landing page not converting that’s the issue.
One tool you can use is Crazyegg.com. With Crazyegg it will show you where people scroll, what they click on. It’ll track the mouse movements of your visitors and that will give you insights on what you need to change so that you can maximise your conversion rate.
You can also use a tool called SEMRush to view competitors landing pages. If it’s working for them, why reinvent the wheel? Be like the Japanese and improve your landing page on an already successful design.
3. Recruit Affiliates
The next step is to recruit affiliates and it’s not all that easy. Where do you look for them, right? You can’t just go around the web to go find marketers and say “Hey, you want to join my affiliate program?”
Instead, you want to join Professional Affiliate Networks on websites such as meetup.com. You can also go to conferences like Affiliate Summit. Affiliate Summit or Affiliate World are really big affiliate conferences where all these marketers go and they’re looking for new offers to promote.
So go to these places and you’ll find people who’ll be willing to promote your offers and some groups may even teach you how to price your service or product better, what to sell it for, what to give affiliates to incentivise them etc.
In conclusion, if you do those three things, you can generate traffic through affiliate marketing. And affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful marketing techniques or tactics out there. Especially for businesses that don’t have a tonne of capital. You only pay money for sales.
