6 Reasons Why You Need To Use Affiliate Marketing In Your Business Today

Every business wants to generate more website traffic and drive up more sales for their brand, products and/or services.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges as a business is actually getting website traffic in the first place.

It's difficult to do, and I understand, you're sick of seeing such low visitor numbers to your site, especially during seasonal periods such as Christmas and Easter.

This is where affiliate marketing can come in handy, to not only help attract new customers, but also improve reputation for your website.

If you're a beginner to affiliate marketing, then this blog post will provide you a strong footing into the affiliate marketing space, I'll give you the essential reasons to get started with affiliate marketing today!

Ready? Let's start...

What is Affiliate Marketing in plain English?

Have you ever bought a product from a store, whether that be groceries or some gadget, have been extremely happy with it that you thought you'd show your friends?

You show your friends, and they ask you where you got the item from...

You then reply with the shop, and potentially even tell them how much you paid for it, your friend then goes to buy the product...

What you've actually just done is referred somebody to buy this product, and they might not have considered buying it previously - they liked the product so much that they've taken YOUR advice to purchase and make that investment.

This is, in essence, exactly what affiliate marketing is in the digital world. You add a link to your website (probably your blog post) and whenever someone clicks that link and buys the product or service, you earn a commission.

Of course, affiliate marketing extends a bit beyond just adding a link to your web page.

You need to build trust with your audience, and constantly be providing them with value, value that makes them think...

"Woah! I really got something out of this piece of content"

If you can do this, then you're likely a perfect candidate for affiliate marketing and can start to explore a bit more into the topic.

What are the benefits of affiliate marketing for businesses?

There's many reasons as a business owner why you might want to integrate affiliate marketing in your website, and it doesn't have to be a website.

It could even be a podcast or YouTube video.

One of the assumptions about affiliate marketing is that it can only be done as part of a blog post, and whilst the vast majority of affiliate links are dotted throughout blog post, it's not the only method.

High quality, laser targeted traffic

As an affiliate marketer, you're able to pick and choose what affiliate programs you partner with and attract traffic from.

Not all affiliate programs are equal, some will be specific to a certain demographic whilst others might even go as specific as the device type.

An example of this would be this...

If you're a business that sells handbags online, and you're partnering with an affiliate program that drives website traffic for those who are interested in SEO, you're going to get a poor conversion rate.

The key here, is to find a program that you can partner with to drive laser targeted traffic to your site.

Affiliate marketing costs next to nothing

Okay, so when I say that affiliate marketing costs next to nothing, it sure can if you're running an in-house affiliate program.

If you're running your own affiliate program, the costs are likely to be minimal.

But what if you're not running your own?

Well, affiliate programs tend to cost absolutely nothing for you to sign up and start adding links and banners to your website.

Some internet marketers will spend thousands on marketing to drive up affiliate sales, but I recommend starting out small, start with the easy programs to build up some experience before moving into some bigger programs.

Improve your SEO score

SEO is an important part of any online business today, more and more people are turning to the internet to look for products, find reviews and read articles on the next product they're about to buy.

There's many different types of SEO, and one way to build up your SEO score is by attracting what's known as backlinks to your site.

Backlinks help raise domain authority for your website, and help prove to Google that your website is an authority in the niche or topic.

When you're involved with affiliate marketing such as social media marketing, you're going to be putting links to your website, products or landing pages all over your advertisements...

This is going to be helping generate organic, natural links, and do you know what's even better?

If someone sees your advert, and they like it, they might even take your web page link, and add it to their website.

Of course, many digital marketers online are going to try and dodge the system and try and force Google to rank their website, and whilst it may work for the short term...

Long term, it's not going to be an online business worth investing in.

So build up organic links now, and allow the viewers of your affiliate adverts to decide whether they like what they see - create excellent content and they will share your content.

It creates partnerships

Did you know that 20% of businesses fail in their first year of starting?

That's quite a large percentage, so anything that you can do today to help give you the best chance at making it beyond your first year is going to be beneficial.

This is why affiliate marketing can really help you grow your business beyond the first year.

How?

Because affiliate marketing is going to involve you building partnerships with other affiliate marketers and other businesses online, both of which can be a long lasting life line for you.

Partnerships can go a really long way if built correctly, and most affiliate marketers online are just in it for the money.

They'll create a connection with someone, and be all in at trying to extract as much money as possible from them, and it's this method of building partnerships that cause businesses to fail.

More income streams

Have you heard the saying "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"?

If your a business that relies solely on selling products or services, chances are, you're going to go through peaks and troughs...

You might even find that over time, you're not making as many sales on those smart watches that you're selling, or even that book that you created online.

This is why it's important to build more than one stream of income, so that if and when another stream of income fails, you've got something to keep you ticking over.

Affiliate marketing allows you to partner with many different programs, and allows you to generate many different commission rates, and that can only be a good thing.

The more forms of income that you have, the more likely you are to secure yourself with a future business that can last through your retirement.

Have you got an email list?

No?

Well, get one, build an email list because this can be another form of an income stream, and can be vital for today.

Almost passive income

I don't really like to talk too much about passive income, because it's not really passive.

And all of the gurus online that say you can generate X amount per day, or per week or per month by doing next to nothing are actually just trying to buy you into their online course...

Not good.

However, if you're building up content for your website, and have the odd affiliate links here and there, it's true that you could generate a bit of passive income on the side of whatever your main product or service is.

How do you do this?

I'll go back to domain authority, reputation and organically working through, putting out content, valuable content every day.

You need to be generating hundreds of pieces of content that are your BEST EVER piece of work in order for affiliate marketing to generate any form of passive income for you.

How do you become an affiliate marketer?

Becoming an affiliate marketer has never been easier today in the digital world.

You need to find an affiliate program to partner with if you're planning on promoting other people's products or services...

Where do you go to find this?

Well, one of the biggest E-Commerce websites on the internet has an affiliate program that you can sign up to in order to get started.

But before this, you need to find a niche, find something that you enjoy talking about.

Chances are, if you enjoy talking about a particular topic, then you can convert these words into blog posts if you're a good writer, and even if you're not, you can still get started today.

I personally recommend (if you're starting out) the Amazon affiliate program, it's free to sign up to and provides an excellent starting point.

Final thoughts

By using my own experience as a web developer, I can help you become better at affiliate marketing since I've gone through these steps.

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