Affiliate Marketing For Businesses: Why Consider?

by

Wondering why you’d ever want to consider affiliate marketing for businesses?

There’s a US $6.82 billion dollar reason for your consideration. Just saying.

Your results (with anything you do) are going to be predictable if and when you are running a regular business, doing the usual things, and going through the same motions like every other business.

  1. Doing blogging and content marketing like everyone else? Wait for years before your results kick in.
  2. Launching paid advertisements on digital media? It won’t work for you unless you are willing to spend, experiment, optimize, and spend some more.
  3. Heard that email marketing truly works? It does, but you’d need to get the first two points right (and on an ongoing basis) first.

Wouldn’t it be nice if things were a bit easier? How would it be if you were to pay for results?

What happens when you let a full battalion of highly-motivated, skilled, and absolutely committed folks to do all the blogging, writing, social media, content marketing, Youtube videos, and even paid ads on your behalf?

It’s called affiliate marketing, and it’s huge. If you are not using it, you are losing it.


Performance marketers (also called as affiliates or partners) do just that. They’ll go ahead and write a blog post (on their already popular blog), share social updates (on their own networks), launch paid campaigns (On Google or Facebook), and do everything that digital marketing demands.


For you.

On your behalf.

Without you ever paying them for it (unless they get you results)

According to 99firms,

“15% of the total digital media advertising revenue is attributed to affiliate marketing, and affiliate programs generate 15%–30% of all sales for advertisers.

Think about it. An opportunity like this was never available to businesses before.

Now, as a business, you can. Just launch your affiliate marketing program or partner program. Affiliate marketing programs for businesses are usually of two kinds:

CPA (Cost per Action) or CPL (Cost Per Lead): These are affiliate marketing programs or partner programs where businesses (such as yours) agree to pay X dollars (or even cents) for each lead that signs up through an affiliate’s or partner’s efforts. Through affiliate networks such as Maxbounty and Peerfly, thousands of affiliates will apply to your campaign (if it’s a good fit for them while you’ll accept them if they are a good fit for you).


If both parties accept, affiliates will be allowed to promote links (usually to landing pages pre-built for your campaigns).

If they succeed in getting you leads, you’ll pay them cash through those affiliate networks.

Simple enough, eh?

CPS (Cost Per Sale): These affiliate programs are more involved and more demanding to run (for both affiliates and for businesses or merchants).

Cost per Sale programs are exactly what you think: affiliates or partners get paid when they make a sale on behalf of the business they partner with or the merchant they are associated with.

Since it’s a sale that’s involved, the payouts are relatively higher (and the stakes are just as high as well for all parties).

Why choose affiliates or partners instead of hiring your own sales team, you ask? Here goes:

Affiliates and partners are:

Independent & business-minded: Affiliates and partners are usually bloggers and website owners (self-employed full-time or part-time)  and are committed to making money from their online publishing efforts.

Partners come from a variety of backgrounds (across countries) and deliver various end-products such as blogs, online courses, membership sites, full-fledged online portals, or online publications.


Each of your affiliates or partners have independent exposure and influence over their own individual audiences.

Collectively, that’s powerful. It’s an exposure you’d have paid with your lungs to have.

Highly-motivated partners: At a time when it’s absolutely impossible to keep someone motivated enough to work for your business, there are several million potential affiliates and partners who are already highly motivated (all on their own) to help put out a good word for you.

Some affiliates and partners have already built up sizable audiences (even before they’ll come around to promote your products). Others are on their way up.

Either way, these are people (or teams) that have motivation from the word go. They don’t need your money until they get you results.


Let that sink in for a moment.

Your affiliate program or affiliate management is automated

When you pick up smart tools such as PartnerStack , Tapfiliate for launching your affiliate program or partner program or when you use a full-fledged affiliate network such as ShareaSale, most of the “affiliate management” part of the equation is handled for you.

Once you launch your affiliate program or partner program, upload affiliate assets (banners, emails, affiliate training material, and other assets), and establish your rules or terms or conditions, everything can be automated (unless you want to get proactive and manage affiliates on top of automated affiliate management that PartnerStack, Tapfiliate, and ShareaSale provide).

Payments are automated

No affiliate or partner ever wants to wait and wonder when you (as a business or merchant) is going to make payments. On the other hand, no business wants to pay for no results (or for fraud or for malicious transactions).

Partner management tools like Tapfiliate, PartnerStack and ShareaSale allow you to automate payments based on several conditions.

Each of those platforms also have anti-malpractice systems, fraud detection, and several other features to help you and your partners do business without worry.

Traffic & Sales, on Autopilot

With several thousands (or maybe even millions) of affiliates and partners pushing the word out digitally across the world, you’ll see an instant spike in traffic, leads being generated, and of course sales. Your total expenses (towards affiliates or partners) will only accrue when these results come in (say leads generated or sales made).


If you’ve set up your partner program or affiliate program right and by using appropriate affiliate management software, you’ll see a glowing roster full of sales thanks to the collective efforts of your affiliates and partners. Period.

Do you have a partner program or affiliate program in place? If yes, how is it going for you? If not, why not?

Some of the links in posts and elsewhere are partner links and affiliate links (the only way I keep some money flowing in). You can purchase some of these products and I make commissions which keeps the lights on. You never pay more. Sometimes, you get discounts. Thank you for understanding. Here's the Aff Discloure Policy (if you love that kind of stuff).