What is an affiliate partner and how relevant is for your business?

As an affiliate marketer, you are in the middle of a relationship. Your audience and your partner. Your audience is the visitors to your site, the people who trust in you and your content and come to you for information, answers, and help for specific topics.

What is an affiliate partner? It’s the other part of the equation. It’s the brand, the advertiser, the merchant with whom you have agreed on some terms about an affiliate program. It will support you with its brand, advertising materials, its stock and codes for tracking your activity as a promoter to its business with your audience to lead them as referrals to register, buy, subscribe to an email list or another action with that advertiser.

It’s a business partner, not a co-worker

As cold as it might sound, you have no more significant commitment or obligation with your affiliate partner than that established within the affiliate agreement.

The obligation of it finish when it provides your affiliate code for tracking yours and your referrals movements, and the surveillance it can do regarding the proper use of its advertising materials along with the network. Your obligation is respecting the agreed rules and referring people to their site. There is no more than that. You don’t even have responsibility for the actions your referrals do on their website, including if they buy, register, subscribe, etc.

Apart from those obligations, whatever other action or decision you take on your business, it is a matter of yours and your team if you have one.

Keep in mind that your partner, the program, advertising materials, and ID and just precise tools for your business. The important thing is your niche and your audience, and any affiliate or another kind of monetizing resource should be the interest of that audience.

Your affiliate partner will provide you with information, images and an ID or tracking code

Establishing a clear and healthy separation that exists between your business and your partner’s, you can start from there to take advantage of the resources it has created.

You can’t modify those materials; however, you can administer them as long as they fit the purpose and design of your content. There will be some parts of your website where would be beautiful and useful to pin up a banner or an icon which includes your affiliate id. Some images are attractive enough to engage people to hover over and click over them. Just think of them strategically and don’t abuse putting them everywhere.

Your affiliate id alone or inserted HTML context of the imagery can be used to link directly to your affiliate partner’s site. However, as we commented in another post when inserted alone as a hyperlink within the context of your content is better than it is centralized, and all your pages and posts referring to an affiliate product or service send first your visitors to that centralized pages or reviews where they can find the affiliate links.

Regarding the information, be aware that chances are that it is not just for your private use and that would have been published online before. That means that if you use it as is, you are going to duplicate content which is penalized.

Read that relevant information especially if pertains to technical knowledge about a product, take note and then write it in your own words as if you were talking to a friend about something that you saw in a store. This way, you are creating a useful piece of content without duplicate it.

An affiliate partner expects you to generate a profit. You want to grow your business from it.

Think like you own a company with an affiliate program. What would you like your affiliates to do? Generating profits, right? It doesn’t matter if such affiliates print a million flyers containing their affiliate id to distribute them on a corner of the street or if they send referrals, by all means, they know online as long as they don’t violate the terms of the agreement.

Now think like you own a business who is using the program of your affiliate partner just as one of the tools you could use within a big plan to generate trust and loyalty from your audience by becoming an authority in your field, and of course thanks to it become wealthy over time.

Different points of view, uh?

Referrals reach your partner through valuable content on your website

The core of your business is content. The honest and thorough content you write after you research on a specific topic. This content comprises the main characteristics of that topic, it shows the sources of your information, it tells your readers how to do something and how don’t, it describes the process of the problem, lists the pros and cons, provides examples of it and its variations, etc.

This content and all its details it’s the main reason why your readers came to your site. They were searching online over the topic you write about. They would know nothing about you but have common interests, and you are the ‘expert’ on that theme. It doesn’t matter if you are writing about it from 20 years ago or just have written a post. The thing is that you are giving that people ‘the right information, at the right moment they are looking for it’. It is all they want, a source of information that helps them to solve their doubts or troubles.

That post or page, that specific piece of information have matched with the interests of someone out there, and now you have their attention, for a while. If you are bringing valuable data and new and useful knowledge on that topic, something with a practical application, you’ll keep that attention longer.

As the visitor stays in your site reading throughout your content, more questions and ideas will appear in their mind. They will want more information, some of which could be about related products or services related to that topic. That’s the exact moment when you can lead them to your in-depth review, to expand their knowledge and show the path to your affiliate offer.

As you can see, the program of your affiliate partner is at the end of the whole process. It’s crucial because it will crown all your efforts with a profit, but it’s the final step, not the first one.

The first step starts with your content!

Have you heard that currently “content is king” in online business? Do you want to refine the content you offer on your website? Become an expert creator of your content. Go here for more information.

The match between your niche and the offer of your affiliate partner is key to achieving a profit

Just to not be redundant, if the process described above go well from the beginning to the end, the profit will be yours. But could happen that almost all this pathway goes as it should be until the people come to the affiliate offer of your partner just to find that is not exactly the product they are looking for, or that it is too expensive, or it isn’t for the right age, or gender or weather or whatever issue… fill in the blank!

What happened here?

Well, it happened that the offer of your affiliate partner didn’t match the interests of your visitors. You took them all the way to the right place, except for the last step. That means they aren’t aligned, and you should change for a different offer from the same partner or the offer of a different partner that better adjust to those interests or (the hardest way) change the intention of your content to catch up the interests of another kind of audience that fits better with the initial offer.