Surviving in affiliate marketing is becoming more and more difficult, not only for newcomers but for experienced players as well, with high entry costs a result of expensive traffic and fast-growing competition.
To succeed in affiliate marketing you need to impress your potential clients: that means having a value proposition and accurate positioning as well as providing your partners with additional perks.
So, how do you survive in such a rapidly growing and competitive industry as affiliate marketing?
Think like an advertiser
To be competitive among other affiliate marketers, first of all, you have to foresee advertiser’s aspirations and needs. Thus, you should completely understand the life-cycle of one click within the sales funnel and its step-by-step behaviour.
Of course, the stages which one click passes through may differ from one advertiser to another. You, therefore, have to define the product type, the niche your advertiser is working in and other peculiarities to ensure you choose the right tools to lead a potential buyer to the purchase.
Understanding advertisers’ needs are also about driving higher quality traffic. The days when advertisers did not care about traffic sources are already gone. Now all processes in affiliate marketing are flowing much faster, and the traffic is analysed automatically. So drive traffic fairly, as once you lose advertiser’s trust, you will not gain it again.
Calculate metrics and analyse data
Track each advertising campaign at all the stages of the sales funnel from the first click of your potential client to the final point when you calculate all the metrics that are important to the advertiser. You have to analyse all the data “out of the box”. Think wider and deeper, gather all the possible data, analyse correlations, and so on.
The more you plunge into the market the advertiser operates in, the more you understand it. Thus, any of your advertising campaigns will bring you to a better performance, and it will be the way for you to multiply yours and your advertiser’s profits up to several times. Besides, each client the advertiser gets with your help will be a contribution to your further successful partnership. Be a reliable part of their marketing team and they will love you forever.
Use automation
The formula is simple: the higher the automation rate is, the fewer personnel you need, the higher production rate you receive and the more accurate your analytics is. All this reduces your costs and gives you additional competitive advantages over other affiliate marketers. The lower your costs are, the higher profit you get. With the abundance of developing technologies, automation is no longer a problem in affiliate marketing: you can automate any process from traffic buying to analysis. All you need is to choose the right software that meets your business requirements and goals.
As affiliate marketing is about “win-win” relations, advertisers and managers of affiliate networks can also be promotive of their systems’ automation. Understanding that their success depends greatly on your effective performance, they could be very helpful to you. For example, there are plenty of solutions which an affiliate network can use to improve its affiliates’ results.
Keep working with your customers and audience
Even when your advertising campaigns are profitable, there is always room for improvement. For example, a lot of affiliate marketers tend to forget about working with their own traffic for defining audience segments and further retargeting. Regardless of the vertical you are working in, you can always get much more from your traffic. As a good affiliate marketer you should know everything about your traffic and be able to reuse the information gathered about users up to several times: from simply working with different audiences on Facebook to using additional services, such as data management platforms, for collecting and organising audience data across devices. Everyone knows the value of data collection, and gathering information could be quite a difficult task. But solving this problem will increase your profit immensely.
Be useful
Now the role of networking and building up trusting relations is more important than ever. While visiting professional events in the affiliate marketing industry, you have a unique opportunity to meet people relevant to you, make necessary contacts with potential partners and introduce yourself as a professional in the sphere. Attending different conferences, workshops or other professional meetings will make it easier to develop relations with the people you know personally.
Over time, human relations have proven to be one of the most important assets you could ever offer. Be a friend to your partners and clients, care about them, be attentive to their needs and make sure they are satisfied – that will bring you to success and prosperity in any business including affiliate marketing.