Affiliate Marketing For Small Business/Non-Slimeballs
In its simplest terms, affiliate marketing is basically commission-only sales.
Here’s how it generally works:
1. As a company, you provide an affiliate with a custom code and/or link that typically gives a discount.
2. The affiliate shares their link and code with their audience.
3. Audience buys (incentivized by affiliate and discount offer), affiliate is given a commission from the company, and the company gets free backlinks and sales.
As a business, it’s up to you to figure out an affiliate arrangement that works for you. Here are two example landing pages on small business websites:
https://giftmdi.com/affiliates/
https://joyorganics.com/pages/affiliate
Now you can’t just put up this page and wait for the bees to flock to you like you’re a pile of honey. If you are a small business or new to offering an affiliate program, you’ll have to approach people you want to participate. For my affiliate program, I contacted local bloggers, local friends with good social networks, and people who posted a lot under local hashtags like #barharbor. I offered 10% off with a coupon and a 10% commission on the sale with a custom code. “Type in JERRY to get 10% off!” In the meantime, Jerry gets 10% of the sale. Having 11 affiliates talking about my site online was a way to look legitimate and build in backlinks to my new site relatively quickly.
Note: I had one very big affiliate (25,000 Facebook followers) who got no sales… and a much smaller blog that got about 20 – so for affiliate marketing to work, it’s not about audience size but audience loyalty/trust. And if you don’t believe me, all you have to do is read the headline of this article: https://www.insider.com/instagrammer-arii-2-million-followers-cannot-sell-36-t-shirts-2019-5
In terms of outcomes to my e-commerce site working with affiliates, besides getting orders I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, between the niche blog content (100ish posts) and affiliates sharing, we built over 4,000 backlinks in 5 years. (If you’re not sure how many backlinks your website has, check your analytics or you can use a backlink checker tool like this: https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker)
How To Set It Up
Basically, you have two options when it comes to setting this up for your business:
1) Set it up on your own website. WordPress plugins exist for affiliate programs for example so you can run everything (the code generation, stats, payouts, etc.) on your own website.
2) You can use third-party software (there are TONS). Common ones include:
shareasale.com
impact.com
cj.com
Obviously, if you go with option 2, that website is going to take some kind of cut but everything is set up for ease of use so, as with most things in life, you get what you pay for.
And for an example of how affiliates promote products for businesses they work with, follow influencers and you’ll see examples. For discussion here, check out Alicia McCarvell’s TikTok account (captions and video content show some affiliate promos but you’ll notice it’s not even in the majority of what she does content wise – who wants to follow someone who is 100% advertisement anyway?) and check out her LinkTree profile, which is a website she uses to link to her other online projects and affiliate relationships:
https://www.tiktok.com/@aliciamccarvell?lang=en
https://linktr.ee/aliciamccarvell
The reality is every affiliate, whether they are a full-time content creator or just want to work with your affiliate because they like your business, is going to have a different way of talking about your business online… and you have to be ok with that. They are not paid marketers crafting messages for your approval. They are commission-only salespeople who you are lucky to have, so create a program that attracts and retains them, and your business may grow online in ways you can’t expect.
More info:
https://zapier.com/blog/affiliate-marketing-for-small-business/
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