Ever considered how to use affiliate marketing programs or partner programs for your business? You should launch an affiliate marketing program for your business because it’s a well-known method to multiply your efforts to grow your business exponentially.
The whole world will put in the hard work just to promote your products and services.
Several businesses tend to use blogging, social media, email marketing, paid advertising, and several other digital marketing methods to grow.
All that’s good and they all work.
Organic marketing takes time (and you might not have the patience for it). Paid advertising takes money and you might not have the budget for it.
So, what will you do? Let others do the work for you. Let self-employed, dedicated, committed, and absolute “go-getters” do all the hard work for your business. If you have products or services, let affiliates or partners do all the marketing for you — at their expense, by spending their time, and their resources.
Did you know that you could actually multiply the growth of your business by using affiliates or partners?
Read:
Affiliate Marketing Statistics: Embrace the Potential of Partners
PartnerStack: Launch, Scale, & Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Program
10 Best Affiliate Marketing management Tools (Or Software) For Your Business
For instance, ShareaSale has several companies you might already be aware of such as WPEngine, OptinMonster, Mouseflow, NameCheap, MonsterInsights, WPForms, and several others.
PartnerStack has my all-time favorites such as Unbounce and an account of at least 19 SaaS companies that grew phenomenally with the help of partners or affiliates.
However, setting up an affiliate program, recruiting quality affiliates, managing affiliates or partners, and helping affiliates grow by providing them with support and resources is also work.
How do you set up an affiliate program, you ask? Just use any of the following:
While you are at it, here are some best practices to ensure you have a successful partnership program or affiliate program:
Ask yourself: Is Affiliate Marketing Good For Your Business?
Not all businesses are a good fit for affiliate marketing. Some verticals such as fashion, retail, e-commerce, SaaS companies, wellness, beauty, telecom, media, online courses, membership sites, and other Internet-based businesses are a perfect fit for affiliate marketing.
If you are a small service provider, coach, consultant, etc., affiliate marketing is the wrong marketing channel for you (you just can’t handle the growth and the demand, period).
If you launched your affiliate program on ShareASale or PartnerStack, most affiliates will automatically start applying for your program. At that point, you’d have to seriously get into a vetting process for those inbound affiliate applications and look for quality affiliates (not the number of affiliates).
Recruit affiliates actively
Launching your affiliate program or partnership program doesn’t mean you can sit back and relax (you can, but maybe later). It’s critical that you actively recruit your affiliates or partners.
Look out for micro-influencers or influencers, bloggers, YouTube creators, Instagram influencers, and anyone else with the right kind of audience that’s a close fit for your kind of business or niche.
Until you reach a mass of targeted affiliates, you can’t lift your legs up and sit down (actually, you can’t ever).
Focus on the personal touch
After onboarding affiliates, don’t just vanish into thin air. Actively reach out to your affiliates or partners and ensure that they are on the money. Ask them if they have questions, provide them with marketing material, help them out with doubts (if any), and even listen to their ideas on how they’d like to promote your products and services.
If possible, provide affiliates with the know-how necessary to succeed with your partner program. Share ideas, let new affiliates know what other top affiliates of your program do and let them know what kind of digital marketing channels work best.
Your affiliates should know you (affiliate managers) by your first name.
Make resources available to affiliates and partners
There’s a reason why I insist that you use established affiliate platforms, affiliate tools, and affiliate networks: dependability and the fact that it’s an easier way for affiliates to get access to the affiliate resources, program materials, business assets that they’ll need to effectively promote your business.
For instance, some publishers (who happen to be affiliates) with a strong social network will want to use “deep linking” while sharing content on social media networks or when they are blogging.
Most affiliate networks and platforms (Rakuten, for instance) make it really hard to find deep links (such as specific custom pages on your site, a specific resource, an eBook, or an online course).
Another affiliate network I know (but won’t name) actually takes a cut out of affiliate commissions at the time of payouts.
Choosing the wrong affiliate platform or affiliate network could only mean heartburn later on when you realize that your affiliates can’t generate custom links, deep links, or when you realize that you can’t make payments, or when the affiliate network in question has a habit of taking commissions from affiliate payments (this is supposed to be free).
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