What is an affiliate marketing company?
 – Choosing the best partner

For a healthy and rewarding relationship in your life, you choose to join with a person you get along, you know her/him well and appreciate what can you get in return. The same is valid for business, you have to choose the best partner, in this case, the best affiliate marketing company if this is how you are going to monetize your website and actually your whole business.

The affiliate program as part of a company’s strategy

Probably the idea of affiliate marketing would be as old as the humankind or at least as old as commerce became an essential part of the way of living of people. Someone who had some commodities or other goods and services would ask another individual for spreading the word earning some revenue for this action without being the owner or being in charge of such merchandise.

However, it was until 1996 that this idea became popular as Jeff Bezos included as part of his strategy to sell e-books through Amazon. Then it became a common way to increase sales in many businesses all over the world because it has some clear advantages over other advertising methods: it’s simple, cheap, doesn’t create complicated legal commitments between the merchant and the affiliate and there are thousands of people willing to profit this way.

Now big and small companies devote part of its efforts to create a well-organized affiliate program as part of its business strategy. They include highly specialized teams of people and software to manage the subscription of affiliates to the program; the tracking of their affiliate ids; and several options of rewarding depending on the volume of registered referrals. Of course, they include as well some rules of behavior regarding where, when, and how it is allowed to insert and show both the affiliate links and the imagery related to a specific brand.

If affiliate programs were seen some time ago as an amateur mode of making money, those days are gone because today is an integral part of how a brand owner tends to extend its influence to grow the business.

Anyone can create an affiliate program, but …

Let’s suppose that your children set up a lemonade stand right there in your garden. Then to increase their sales, they ask some friends to spread the word about the pleasant taste of the lemonades around the corner for a great deal of 15% of the earnings in exchange. That means 15 cents for their friends for every dollar your children earn selling lemonades (some merchants like Shopify could offer profits as high as 200% for every standard subscription they get thanks to you. However, the gold standard still is Amazon who pays till 10% to their more active and successful affiliates).

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As you can see, creating an affiliate program, it is as simple as the process described above. Now, why is not everyone doing it?

If you get that 15% (or even a higher percentage) for every referral you bring to your friend’s business that’s a great deal, however, are you getting some significant money at the end of the day, week or month? That depends on the number of people you bring to the merchant and how many of those people buy a lemonade.

Even with percentages as high as 50%, 100% or 200% if you earn them every now and then, that’s not going to make you decide going full time or at least to use as complementary income at the end of the month. For an income become a significant amount in your pocket what you need to do is bring enough people to the merchant for strong sales.

At this point, it is evident that you won’t see any results as many people as you can invite if they are not interested in what you offer. Or if the product is low quality or the user experience with the business brand is terrible to name some points to take into account in the process. No sales are made, so no earnings are generated for the advertiser nor for you

The brand of a company or the relevance of its affiliate program for your business?

To many people, when talking about affiliate marketing, the first idea that comes to their mind is Amazon. It’s expected that we think this way because Amazon it’s the top world retailer and it has the largest stuff for sale worldwide. But it’s not the only option you have and for sure not always the best either.

As significant, influential, and powerful as Amazon has become, it has also diluted the effect of its brand over the particular niches. The name of this brand is recognizable for almost everyone, but at the same time, each one of us can think of different things and niches associated with it.

Besides, when you choose to promote a product from Amazon through its affiliate program, the brand that will highlight won’t be that of Amazon but that of the medium, small or even unknown retailer selling through its platform

Wouldn’t be nice to have niche-specific big brands to affiliate with? There are and a lot of them.

Are your niche focused on electronic devices? Sony has an affiliate program.

Is your audience within the travel niche? Booking has an affiliate program.

Are you writing content on your website about books? Sure you can take advantage of Amazon but also from Barnes and Noble affiliate program.

Do you focus your content and interests towards shoes? Zappos has an affiliate program.

We can continue here for an endless list of big brands related to very narrow niches.

Nevertheless, big advertisers brands aren’t either the only option you have to find a robust, and trustable affiliate program aligned with your niche. There are thousands of companies which produce items for an enormous amount of highly specific niches.

Let’s say just for the sake of an example here that you are interested in orthopedic prostheses, luxury pens, plus-size clothing and whatever you can think of, there is a small or even tiny company that produces what you are interested in and yes they have an affiliate program suited for your business, website and niche.

Are you waiting for an invitation?

It would be a dream come true that your website was already full of interesting, focused and relevant content, your brand now was an authority in the field of your interest, your visitors were coming for thousands and thanks to all this, advertisers are eager to do business with you. However, it takes time for this to happen.

In the meanwhile, you have to take action, do some research, and choose among different options which are the best for you, your audience, your niche, your brand, your business right now

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Don’t wait until things are perfect. They never are. In turn, start with the content you have already on your site or that you are going to write soon in the niche you have chosen. Then pick up an affiliate program that suits the whole line of your niche, not just that of an individual post. The tone of your content should be consistent throughout the entire site and so the affiliate offers.

Go for them the moment you feel ready to bring valuable content

Once you have chosen and subscribed to the right affiliate program, it is time to include the corresponding links in your website. Be careful though to don’t stuff affiliate links everywhere in your site.

Remember that your offers should be relevant and contextual, so even if your site is about t-shirts and you affiliated with a brand who sells shirts doesn’t mean that all your visitors are interested in the same kind of shirts. Be specific and focused.

Maybe you can write some blog post about t-shirts for children, then insert affiliate links relevant for t-shirts for children not for women. In another blog post, you can write about t-shirts for middle age women and give them options for items to buy and so on.

One more vital point to talk about is centralization. Even though it’s ok to insert some relevant affiliate links within its related content, it’s better not just for purposes of better reading for your visitors but also for better rankings from search engines that you create in-depth reviews on each product or service that interest you for recommendation to use or avoid.

Your product review will serve them as a reference where you can lead to your visitors from any blog posts every time that you want to talk about such product without putting its affiliate link in every post you write regarding it.