From December 2017 to June 2018, the search frequency of the term “affiliate marketing” increased by 44%. This is an absurd and rare spike in traffic for a business category, nevertheless, it shows how quickly affiliate marketing has picked up steam. Ecommerce has continued to chug along and is estimated to be worth 12 trillion dollars globally by 2020. The US and China are to lead this ballooning market. Indeed, ever since the early day of eBay and Amazon, those with an entrepreneurial mindset have increasingly found a way to make a living online by setting up passive income streams. While there are many ways to set up a passive income stream, there are none as straightforward and available as affiliate marketing.
I have a question, I’m going to throw an analogy out here and I’d like to ask you if you want to be the affiliate marketer or if you want to be the business. For business, press 1. For affiliate marketer, press 2.
The problem? Nobody knows about this product—or at least not enough people know. Traditional marketing efforts have plateaued a bit, what now? If only there was a way you could directly reach people through non-traditional means and have your content preceded by a different type of value offering. Oh, what’s that? There is a way? Yes! Affiliate marketing.
Turns out, if you have people who have an audience/influence in a particular domain, and they promote your product, this leads to conversions! This idea really isn’t that new, let’s not forget that Ringo Starr (the drummer for The Beatles for you youngins) starred in a Pizza Hut commercial. Maybe he wanted the attention he felt he didn’t get in one of the most critically acclaimed bands of all time, or maybe he just really likes Pizza Hut. If you’re Pizza Hut, you don’t really care either way, because you can bet that Ringo sold pizzas.
Now, most people can’t get Ringo Starr to advocate for their product, but through offering affiliate programs for your products, you can have many different people with varying levels of influence provide you brand exposure that you would’ve ordinarily never received through traditional marketing efforts. A big hurdle in marketing is getting people to like or trust your brand. Millions of dollars are spent each year on advertising to create brand exposure and a positive image. The benefit of affiliate marketing for businesses is that you can potentially bypass this difficult aspect of marketing your product.
In affiliate marketing, you can break down the entire process down to 4 key parties. There’s the merchant who sells the product that is going to be marketed. There is, of course, the affiliate marketer who will be marketing the product. Then, there’s the customer who engages with the affiliate marketer through a particular medium such as a blog or youtube channel and purchases the product. What many people do not know is that there is a 4th party—the network. An affiliate network is a party that promotes the affiliate program to any publishers (affiliate marketers) that are participating in the affiliate network. In other words, the network is the middleman which provides information on which deals are available for affiliate marketing.
The interesting thing about affiliate marketing is that the publisher does not need to be involved to any great degree with the product or the company selling the product. A publisher in the most basic sense can be a person who simply likes the product and wishes to promote it. In the case of someone who has a large following, the commission rates can be enormous compared to smaller publishers. The difficulty with affiliate content is appearing genuine. If a publisher seems disingenuous about their enthusiasm in the product, it may not convert all that well.
However, when a publisher and product are a match made in heaven, it is a highly effective marketing strategy that can garner a ton of profits for both parties. The variance in success between products as well as publishers is exactly the reason why the commission is almost always based on the sale and not any particular action such as CPC or CPM (cost per click/cost per thousand). For the business, having an affiliate program and publishers to promote the product is a fairly risk-free way to gain additional profits, it is for this reason that affiliate programs are so proliferated and available to even the smallest publishers. Because money is only exchanged when a sale is made, so the business is always making a profit and the cut paid to the publisher is justifiable because in many cases it was a sale that might not have been made otherwise.
Despite there being a lot of buzz about it nowadays, affiliate marketing has existed for more than a decade. Whether you’re a blogger who passionately believes in a product or brand, or you’re a b2b affiliate marketer that sells various solutions to pain points, Pinpoint Payments can make sure you get paid.
Affiliate marketers are at heart, online business owners. And like many online business owners, they need a fast, effective, and reliable payment processing solution to ensure everything goes smoothly. We have worked with all parties ranging from small publishers, affiliate marketing websites, and large advertisers to help their online shopping experience be the best it can be through efficient payment solutions. Get started today! Give us a call at (866)-257-0502 or visit our contact page here!