Whether your online business is large or small utilizing online marketing can help take your sales to the next level. Affiliate marketing is an additional way to increase your sales.
With affiliate marketing you can not only gain sales but an affiliate program can also help your branding. This is especially helpful for smaller companies. There are several types of affiliate marketing, for example pay per click (PPC), pay per performance, pay per sale, and pay per lead are the most popular. Depending on your program you can choose which type of affiliate marketing best suits you.
There are also several types of affiliates to work with including data feed affiliates, bloggers, influencers, loyalty, cart abandonment, paid search and coupon to name some of the most popular. Again, depending on your products and the type of sales you are looking for, you choose which of these are best for your affiliate program.
Once you have chosen your type of affiliate marketing and affiliates you want to work with, you should then explore the different analytics available to give you a clearer understanding of your program stats such as conversion rates, AOV, EPC, cCPM, or a creative performance report. Many networks already include these for you making it easy for you to compare daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly. There are also different tools out there to help you such as FMTC and Google Analytics.
Choosing a network is also a huge factor for your success in Affiliate Marketing. There are several networks out there, each have different rate structures and benefits. Do they offer help in recruiting for affiliates, how does their data feed work, do they have different conversion rate rules you can set, do they have auto responders, do they offer pay per call, do they allow toolbar affiliates, will you have a personal representative to help you when you are stumped, do they offer any free advertising? There are a multitude of questions you need to ask before signing with a network.
Affiliate program management can be complex but with the proper groundwork and knowledge your program can be successful. Whether you want to manage it on your own our outsource it you should have full knowledge of how affiliate marketing and management work to have a successful program.