An affiliate program is a cooperative agreement between a selling company and partners who help promote its products or services. Under this program, partners actively attract new customers, for which they receive a commission on sales made thanks to their efforts. This strategy allows companies to significantly reduce marketing costs and expand their customer base. Affiliate programs have grown significantly in popularity in recent years, and Demandsage estimates that the affiliate marketing industry will reach $17 billion by 2024, three times the 2015 level.
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How to earn from affiliate programs?
To increase income from affiliate programs and make them higher than expenses, it is important to choose correctly not only the program, but also methods for attracting potential customers. In the work of an arbitrageur, the following key steps are emphasized:
- Determining the appropriate affiliate program.
- Selecting the right platforms to get quality traffic.
- Selection of means and creatives to attract attention.
- Analyzing the results and improving the effectiveness of promotions.
Let’s look at each of these stages in more detail.
Step 1: Selecting an affiliate program
Each platform offers a different set of offers, so it’s important to keep an eye on all the possibilities at once. Beginners are recommended to pay attention to the following indicators:
- Rate – this is the amount the company is willing to pay for each achievement of the target action.
- Confirmation is how often the company confirms or rejects the target action. Look for a program with a 90% or higher confirmation rate to reduce the risk of rejection.
Pay attention to reputable rankings of best affiliate programs 2024, in order to decide on your choice.
Step 2: Selecting the sites
There are several methods of work in the field of traffic arbitrage.
- A partner has his own channel (with an already formed audience, subscribers) on which he places advertisements.
- The partner does not have his own channel and uses other people’s channels to place paid advertising. This method involves finding authors, bloggers with an already established audience.
When advertising with the participation of famous personalities, bloggers, the right choice of platform will significantly save the budget. The agreement on advertising is concluded individually with each author. Prices and conditions can vary greatly, which makes it possible to find a platform with high conversion and low cost.
When choosing where to place ads, whether banner, contextual, teaser or targeted, it is important to consider the following criteria:
- Relevance of the theme of the site to the product or service you are advertising.
- The presence of your target audience on the selected site.
- Extensive coverage of the audience of this resource.
- The effectiveness of advertising placement, taking into account its cost.
Using targeting and context, you can find a target audience for almost any small or medium-sized business. Often arbitrageurs limit themselves to these two channels because of their functionality and coverage.
When choosing a site to place a banner, it is recommended to ask its owner for statistics from metrics counters. In case of refusal, it is worth considering whether the stated indicators really correspond to the real situation.
Step 3: Identify the necessary tools
The choice of tools for promotion depends on the channel used. In social networks it can be targeted advertisements or advertising in communities, in search engines – contextual advertising, and on specialized resources – teaser advertising. Each channel can use different formats and creatives for advertising. For example, in search advertising, you can choose from text ads, dynamic ads, or search banners. Social media targeting offers many formats, such as standard feed posts, carousels, posts with buttons, ads in stories, and text and image ads in the sidebar.
Stage 4: Analysis and optimization
The main part of working with affiliate marketing is to test, analyze and optimize your ad campaigns. To begin with, use a limited budget and create a variety of advertising formats. Prepare several versions of creatives for each format. If you have sufficient funds for each creative, create different versions of images, headlines and descriptive texts. Run these ads, allocating about 2-3% of the total budget to each version.
After the start of the displays, analyze the collected data. This process is quite simple: disable ads that did not bring any return, ads with low efficiency either finalize or also disable, and the most successful variants continue to show, increasing the budget for them. During the optimization process, it is important to check all ads, even those that show minimal clickability. It is possible that ads with low CTR attract leads, while ads with high CTR do not bring conversions. If possible, test not only different creatives, but also different advertising platforms so that you can find the most effective channels for your goals.
