Why affiliate marketing is great for WFH
Does your mind pop with interesting marketing ideas when you come across a product or service? Do you think you can use your marketing instincts to help companies find customers while working from home? Then affiliate marketing is for you.
The cloud-computing era we are in now has seen several affiliate marketers make it big: Pat Flynn, John Chow, and Pierre Bradshaw to name a few. Successful affiliate marketers not only make a handsome package but are also revered by the industry for their crucial role in connecting customers and companies.
Apart from the financial prospects, the flexibility of working from home, a constant flow of income, and low investment costs make affiliate marketing an ideal platform to tap into your passion for marketing. With time, effort, and the right strategy, you, too, can become a successful affiliate marketer.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an advertising model where a partner drives traffic and leads for companies and, in turn, receives a commission for the referred traffic. The affiliate partner gets a constant source of income and the company gets a stable and affordable channel for lead generation. A win-win for both the partner and the business.
How does this work?
An aspiring partner joins our affiliate program and chooses products that they want to promote. The partner is then provided a unique referral code that can be placed on their website as a link, banner or creative copy. When interested prospects click on these links, they get redirected to the Freshworks product site. The partner gets paid a commission either for the traffic generated or the products sold, depending on the payment model.
How to make money via affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing has become a crucial growth driver for many companies. With a huge market to address, affiliate marketing aspirants have a good chance of finding a brand that echoes their interests and ideas. If this thought fascinates you, but you don’t know where to start, we have you covered. The following hacks will help you become a successful affiliate partner.
1. Choose the right niche
Affiliate marketers tend to enroll in too many affiliate programs and try to promote too many products. This makes it difficult for them to give due attention to all the products they are associated with. Therefore, choose the affiliate programs of the products that you are passionate about or familiar with.
Before you choose the product, research the market trends and ensure your interests are aligned with the product’s needs. This will ensure that your time and effort will be focussed on products that give you the best probability of success.
2. A promotion platform
Once you have found a niche that aligns with your passion and is also profitable, you are ready to build your website. In order to work as an affiliate marketer, you will need your own platform on which you can promote the products or services you sign up for.
Choose a theme that will resonate well with your audience for the product you chose. Come up with a marketing strategy to make your blogs informative and useful to your target audience. This will, in turn, help you establish a loyal audience for your website. An engaged audience is the key to driving more traffic to your partners and their product websites.
3. Track your campaigns
Start implementing different product promotion strategies to see what works well with your audience. Do A/B testing and measure each of your campaign’s performance and then take actions accordingly. Tweaking a few things here and there can drastically improve campaign performance. Small things like ensuring good banner placements on your website can help maximize traffic to partner websites.
Affiliate marketer Charles Ngo decided to conduct a split test to optimize his campaign page when he noticed it performing badly. He found that every other affiliate was using the same landing page for the campaign and so came up with two alternatives—he added a few new elements to the same page as well as created another page from scratch. The first performed better by 50%, returning a 200% RoI by Day 11 of his campaign.
Most affiliate programs give you insights on the basic stats that you may need. But you can also use your own conversion tracking tool to see how well your campaigns are doing.
4. Follow current trends and techniques
Affiliate marketing can be cutthroat at times. Be updated with the latest marketing trends and techniques to thrive in the game. While organic traffic can be enough to drive traffic to websites, paid marketing can also improve your traffic growth.
Start experimenting with basic SEO techniques. Make sure your efforts help in building traffic to your webpage. When you have exhausted the growth opportunities in SEO, venture into paid marketing channels such as Google Adwords. A healthy mix of organic and paid traffic might be necessary for growth.
5. Use tools for tracking
There are several tools that can help you research the market and the competition as well as track and convert your ad campaigns. This will help you be more efficient and enable you to plan your future campaigns effectively. Analyze the data from the tools to make informed decisions.
Success in affiliate marketing comes with deliberate decision-making and continuous marketing efforts. It can be a while before your efforts start bearing results. But with patience, focus and determination, affiliate marketing can become a lucrative career choice for people with marketing instincts and entrepreneurial nature. With an ever-growing SaaS market, the time is ripe for the next big affiliate marketer. It could be you!
