Affiliate marketing is all about results. When you pay for an advertising campaign, you’re taking a gamble. No matter how much you research and plan, you cannot know how successful the campaign will ultimately turn out. You can’t know for sure if you’ll make back your initial investment, let alone a profit. Affiliate marketing works differently. It works a lot like freelancing. You can make agreements with one or more affiliates to advertise your website or product through the affiliate’s web presence. Usually, affiliates advertise on their own websites, but this isn’t always the case.
What makes affiliate marketing so different from traditional marketing is that you’re guaranteed to get what you pay for. Why? You get what you pay for because the system is set up backwards. Rather than paying in advance for a space for your ad to occupy during a certain amount of time, or for your ad to go into a lottery every time a potential customer performs a search, you only pay affiliates for customers who go to your website. Cookies track who clicks what links, and it’s easy to see which affiliates are pulling in the most prospective customers. It’s like only paying for a billboard when actual customers come through the door.
Run Multiple Campaigns at Once
Marketing is expensive, and many small businesses must even take out loans in order to draw new customers. While the internet has changed how many marketing campaigns operate, they still cost money. Affiliate marketing ensures your money is as productive as possible. However, it also creates opportunities for businesses with enough financial reserves to aggressively pursue multiple affiliates. You can run as many affiliates as you please, so long as you have the financial security to deal with the potential cost of multiple successful marketing campaigns.
Experiment through Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing doesn’t just put your ads in front of new eyes. It ensures you pay for people who are genuinely interested in your product. While many affiliates include ad creation as part of their services, it’s easy enough to provide your own content for affiliates to share. This puts you in the unique position to experiment with your marketing. While you may not be able to try different strategies, you can explore content options. How do two different ads perform when run through the same affiliate? Did one perform significantly better? Do those numbers reflect its performance through other affiliates? Do certain images work better with some affiliates than others? What markets to those affiliates cater to? It’s a cheap and productive way to conduct research.
Affiliate marketing works in favor of the advertiser. Affiliates must earn their pay, and you will not end up losing your entire marketing investment on one failed campaign. The fact that someone else handles the busywork just makes the deal better. You can run as many or as few campaigns as you can manage, and you’ll only pay for actual visitors to your website, not just views of your ad.