Marketing plays a vital role in promoting any business online, no matter what you are offering and whether you are new to the market. Various companies reach for different methods of encouraging new customers, but one of the most popular recently is affiliate marketing. What is it, and what are its cons and pros? Find out if it’s worth investing in this form of marketing.
What affiliate marketing is?
Let’s start with a few words of explanation of the term affiliate marketing. It’s a way of promotion that engages three parties. One is the company that has a product or service to offer and promote. The next is the company or person that uses the available channels, like professional blogs, social media, ads and others to market a given product or service. The third party is the consumer who makes a purchase. Why it’s not a direct path from a manufacturer or service provider to a customer? The company that promotes something on its website gets a commission from every purchase and earns money on advertising something.
Benefits of affiliate marketing
The advantages of affiliate marketing differ depending on which party you are. If your company is the one that owns the product to offer, then the pros of this type of advertising are slightly different. The greatest asset is that you can reach a larger audience, the types of consumers who would normally be unavailable to you. What’s more, affiliate marketing is a good way to evoke trust in customers. This might be important if you are offering a service that might evoke some doubt. Let’s say you have an online casino and attract clients to play games for real money. Only those who feel safe on a platform will engage in games with real money involved. One thing is to create a reliable platform that allows users to get familiar with the rules and requirements, another is to get their first interest. Affiliate marketing makes it easier, as the online casino can be promoted on a website that already has a good reputation among Internet users, and they are much more likely to give it a try when it’s promoted by a reliable platform.
Affiliate marketing, however, has many advantages for the ones that actually do the marketing. It’s a good way to kick-start your small business, as you can easily grow with affiliate marketing. You don’t have to invest to earn, you only need to find a reliable company to market and make sure that what you promote is safe for your customers.
There are yet other advantages of affiliate marketing, including the flexibility it ensures. Various affiliate programs are diversified, and you can choose which options suit you best. Among the most popular reward types you can find Pay-per-Sale, where the money is transferred for every purchase a customer makes, Pay-per-Click when it’s enough that a consumer clicks the affiliate link, and finally, Pay-per-Lead, which rewards every customer that leaves their contact information in the contact form.
These are only a few examples of pros that affiliate marketing has, but as with everything, there are also downsides to this type of advertising.
Cons of affiliate marketing
One of the biggest drawbacks of affiliate marketing is that you only get paid for your effort when the customers get engaged. Currently, when the competition in the online world is fierce, it’s challenging and demanding to interest and attract consumers.
Affiliate marketing also requires patience as it takes time to reach the customers, make them interested, gain their trust and give them time to think about the product or service. If you are the one who uses affiliate links on their blog, posts or anywhere else, you need to remember that it’s your reputation that might get damaged once it turns out that the product you were promoting does not live up to anyone’s expectations.
There are other disadvantages of affiliate marketing that need to be considered before making a final decision. However, if you feel like it’s something you might be good at and that might bring you some profit, it’s easy to find out how to start and participate in affiliate programs, even if you are not running a developing company.
