eCommerce Marketing: Preparation for An Affiliate Program

has become one of the most popular means of making passive income in recent years. However, it is still very obscure to most people. It is a simple process that allows marketers or people with huge followings to make money off products made by a manufacturer. The affiliate is rewarded with a commission for a specific goal met for the manufacturer.

As an eCommerce store owner, you could use eCommerce affiliate marketing programs to boost your sales. You might significantly improve the quantity of traffic you receive by hiring top affiliates.

Apart from selling your own products, you could also become an affiliate for other companies who sell complementary products to yours. This way, you make affiliate sales off other manufacturers’ goods and still make money off of your products. A win-win situation for you.

Just in case you’re still doubting the power of affiliate marketing, here are a few stats to convince you:

• It will be worth over $12 billion in 2022 for the global affiliate marketing industry. This is almost twice its $6.8 billion valuation in 2020.

• Affiliate marketing is responsible for 16% of global eCommerce sales.

• Over 80% of digital marketers use affiliate marketing to increase brand awareness.

In this article, we will explain why implementing correct affiliate marketing strategies can be instrumental to the success of your eCommerce store and how to build an eCommerce store with affiliate products.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a strategy a producer employs to increase the reach of their product by paying a portion of the profit to an “affiliate marketer” who would help distribute the product on their website. It is a symbiotic relationship where both parties enjoy benefits from working together. 

Pat Flynn defines affiliate marketing as receiving a commission for promoting someone else’s product or service. Two parties are involved in every affiliate marketing relationship: the producer and the affiliate.

1. The Producer: This refers to the brand or company that owns the product that is being marketed. They can be an individual or a group looking to promote their product.
2. The Affiliate: They are also known as the publishers. They are responsible for marketing the product in question by utilizing the reach of their website.

How Does It Work?

As an affiliate, you could profit from just one blog post since you only need to attract interested customers to interact with or buy the product in question. The higher the number of people you can attract to the site, the more profit you can make from marketing. 

To start making money with affiliate marketing, you simply need a medium where you can place links to products you wish to promote. This is why an eCommerce store owner has a very suitable platform for promoting products. 

Affiliate marketing consists of five steps:

• Visitors to your site may be interested in the items that affiliates link to in high-quality content. As a rule of thumb, the offers should be reasonable and enticing.

• Clicking on an affiliate link will direct a visitor to a brand’s website or specific product pages on that brand’s website.

• If a customer of the affiliate partner makes a purchase, the affiliate is entitled to a percentage of the sale.

• You’ll make a commission based on how many people click on your affiliate link and buy something.

• The commission will be deposited into the affiliate’s account once the transaction is validated.

Common Errors in Affiliate Marketing made by eCommerce Store Owners 

1. Choosing The Wrong Product to Market

This would apply when you’re marketing other manufacturers’ products. The worst thing you can do as an affiliate marketer is promoting a product you don’t care about but think will make you money. There are a lot of choices out there, so picking the right one is very important. If you know the right product and niche for your affiliate business, you may be able to promote it better.

2. Using a low-quality website

This mostly applies when you’re building an affiliate program for your products. Make sure your affiliate store is easy to use and of excellent quality if you want a lot of sales. Before you start building your affiliate site, you need to do quality research, understand how successful affiliate marketers build their websites, and try to implement elements of those websites into yours.

Summary

Being an affiliate marketer is an excellent way to make passive income for anyone. As an eCommerce store owner, you already have a platform where you can easily paste affiliate links on your website since you already have traffic. 

Affiliate marketing is not a simple task. It can require heavy early investments to kickstart, but it will yield great long-term returns once it is automated.

(Contributed by Oluwafemi Adedeji & Hermes Fang)