Table of contents
Table of contents
An affiliate programme essentially pays someone for recommending your business or services. They can be a useful string to your marketing bow, and they come in all shapes and sizes. In this blog we’ll explain what they are in more detail, and how you could incorporate affiliates into your marketing plan.
Affiliate marketing is more commonly found in blog posts, reviews, videos, and other types of online consumable content.
A craftsperson writes an article describing how to make something, and recommends one of the products used in the project.
Their article includes a link to that product. The business will pay the blogger either a percentage of any sales generated by their referral, or a fixed sum in exchange for the recommendation.
Personal recommendations carry immense weight, and consumers are far more likely to go for a brand recommended by someone they admire, or who demonstrates competence. So a link to your product or service might be a win-win. Your business gets its name out there, and affiliates get a monetary reward for recommending it.
Have a think about any quality control you might want to do first, though. You might not want to pay someone to make recommendations if they’re already recommending everyone else, or if they don’t seem credible.
The way you structure an affiliate programme depends on the goals you want to achieve with it.
You might need to do a fair amount of research to find opportunities to promote your affiliate programme to the right brands and individuals. It’s well worth looking at what any competitors are doing.
A solid affiliate programme can take a lot of time to nurture and build. If that’s too much to take on alongside your regular business responsibilities, then it might be worth hiring an affiliate management agency to handle it all for you.
Setting up affiliate links that automatically compensate those who recommend your business is easier than you might expect if you use a dedicated service. A simple way of doing it is to set up an account with an affiliate marketplace.
Once you’ve set up with an affiliate manager or marketplace, the next step is to tell people about your programme.
Make sure that details of the programme are easily available on your website. It’s also worth taking some time to let existing customers know they can earn a bit of money creating content about your business for their own audience.
As for your financial records (we were always going to mention them): You could create separate projects to manage the income you get from each, or likewise to keep an eye on the income your own affiliates generate for you versus what you pay them.
If you have a blog or YouTube channel for your business where you typically recommend a lot of products, apps or services, it is well worth checking whether any of those brands offer an affiliate programme you can sign up to.
If you want to recommend something like tech products, Amazon Affiliates is a popular one to use. If you want to recommend software or apps, you may be best going through individual programmes on their websites. You can typically find details of these in the footer of a website. They usually take just a few minutes to set up and get approved.
When you sign up, you should get an affiliate or partner login which will give you affiliate links and banners to put on your website or video descriptions.
Affiliate programmes can get a bit of a bad reputation at times because it’s easy to abuse the system. There are entire websites or individuals who recommend solely for the affiliate commission, with no thoughts on the quality of the content or the trustworthiness of the brand.
This leads to people recommending poor quality products or services. Most of the time, this only really does damage to the blogger’s reputation, but it can hurt the business too. Integrity and trustworthiness are so important when it comes to recommending other businesses.
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A creative content writer specialising across business, finance and software topics. I have a love for all things writing, and creating engaging, easy to understand content that helps everyday people!
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