Why you should create an affiliate program?

Affiliate programs here, affiliate programs there… Today, many applications, e-commerce sites or others offer their affiliate program, often through an affiliate platform that will manage it for them.

You have an online business and you are looking for a new lever to attract more customers? You are at the right place. Today, we’re going to see why and how affiliate marketing can be a major lever in your growth.

If you don’t know much about affiliation, I advise you to read this first to understand what we are talking about: What is an affiliate program?

Affiliate programs is risk-free

Affiliate marketing is much less risky than advertising. And for good reason: you only pay when a visitor buys. If an affiliate sends you 100 visitors, but none of them buy, you pay nothing to the affiliate.

And that’s good, because affiliation forces everyone to be efficient. It is in the affiliate’s best interest to be active, because the more active they are in a program, the more money they make.

While a publisher who places a banner ad will earn a few cents every month, or even a few euros if he has a lot of visitors.

On your side, affiliation requires you to have efficient sales pages, or at least a good ratio and a certain transparency towards your affiliates regarding the results, otherwise they will flee your program.

Setting up an affiliate program is not expensive

Setting up an affiliate program can have a different price depending on your choice. Indeed, if you choose to manage your affiliate program entirely, in theory, it will not cost you anything.

However, the following points must be met:

• A very efficient sales tracking system
• A very clear, transparent and reassuring affiliate dashboard for the affiliate
• An easy to set up affiliate program

And to ensure that these points are respected, you will generally turn to an affiliation platform, such as Effiliation (affiliate link) for example. And that has a price that can be from a hundred euros to several thousand euros depending on the platform and the needs.

However, if you are already sufficiently developed, then developing your own solution can be beneficial in the long run, but the development cost can be quite high, but at least you have control.

But if you put it in context and compare it to an advertising campaign, it is still cheaper.

You do not advance money with an affiliate program

With an affiliate program, you get the money from the end customer and you set your own rules regarding the payment period of your affiliates. Of course, I can only advise you to have a very low payout period, otherwise you risk driving away your current and future affiliates.

With affiliate marketing you will never pay an affiliate a commission until you have received money from your customers and this is amazing because it allows you to have hundreds of affiliates with peace of mind because you know that no matter what happens they will get paid (unless you are not legit).

Affiliation brings you qualified visitors

When a visitor arrives at your site after clicking on an affiliate link, we already know that they are interested in your product or service. For example, if one of our affiliates talks about Affilisting in an article and puts an affiliate link to our product, and the visitor clicks on that link, it means that the visitor is interested in the product and may decide to make a purchase.

Affiliation allows you to act as a “filter” in certain cases and therefore increase your overall conversion.

Moreover, the affiliate has every interest in producing quality content in order to bring you a maximum of potential customers. This can be a video review on YouTube of your product for example, or a blog post such as “Product review…”. This is completely more effective than a simple advertising insert.

Affiliation brings you great visibility

Yes, affiliation can bring you a lot of visitors if your network of affiliates is efficient and consistent. If we take Affilisting as an example, our affiliates represent about 50% of the traffic on the website and 30% of our revenues.

These numbers are bound to increase over time as our network grows. By the way, if you want to join our program and earn 50% commission on each sale, you can do that here.

Beware of your affiliates

When you set up an affiliate program, it is essential to define the rules that your affiliates will have to respect.

Indeed, the first thing to do is to set up a validation system on the registration to your program. Verify the identity of the person, ask for the sources on which the affiliate wants to promote your product and finally, ask for a direct way of contact with the affiliate.

If you accept anyone, there is a real risk that some affiliates will use unorthodox methods to generate sales. These methods can have a negative impact on your product and that is not what you want.

This is what happened to us in the early days of Affilisting. We had a very light policy in accepting affiliates for the program. To put it simply, we accepted anyone. One day, a smart guy used “stolen” email lists and pretended to be the founder of Affilisting and spammed everyone with his affiliate link. Of course, we found out about it and removed him directly from the program and today we are much more careful about the requests.

Our affiliate program in figures

As mentioned before, our affiliate program is a very important part of our development. Through our figures, I hope you will understand the importance of having an affiliate program.

The numbers (from July 18, 2022 to August 29, 2022):

• 42 affiliates
• 9 affiliates with at least one sale
• $4200 of sales volume (on $12,654 of total sales)
• $2100 in earnings for our affiliates
• Affiliates present in France, United States and United Kingdom

As you can see, the sales volume generated by our affiliates represents about 35% of our total sales. On top of that, we are starting to have affiliates all over the globe.

Now imagine if we had over 1000 affiliates all over the world. That would allow us to generate sales at any time, anywhere in the world, and then we wouldn’t have to focus on marketing :).

Conclusion

That’s all for this article. We hope it will make you want to develop this lever which can become very important in the development of your business.

We remind you that it is very important to have a quality network of affiliates and to define rules for your affiliates. Finally, being transparent with your affiliates and accompanying them in the implementation of their strategy is essential to build a relationship of trust so that everyone can have a piece of the pie.

Finally, if you already have an affiliate program, don’t hesitate to contact us on twitter or via our chatbox so that we can add it to Affilisting and bring you your first affiliates!