Affiliate Marketing is a great way to generate leads for your business. The implementation is simple and with a constant emergence of new affiliate networks and websites, the opportunities are endless.
In this post, I’m going to explain why affiliate marketing works – and why it’s a strategy your company should be doing to generate leads.
Only pay for qualified leads
What’s great with the cost per lead (CPL) affiliate model is that you only pay for qualified leads. This is the most cost efficient way for a business to use affiliate marketing programs; because it’s quicker to generate a lead rather than a sale (also known as a cost per sale or CPS), more affiliates are willing to run CPL offers instead of CPS offers to monetize their websites.
Great way to outsource lead generation
There are tons of publishers looking to monetize their websites. Most will gladly take a look at your offers and see if they are a fit for their site. As a result, this is a great way to connect with potential affiliates and create mutually beneficial partnerships.
Affiliates want money and you, presumably, want quality leads. It’s a win-win!
The best places to look for publishers are
- Social Media (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+)
- Search (Google, Yahoo, and Bing)
- Industry Related Tradeshows ( Affiliate Summit, LeadsCon, Ad:Tech, and BlogWorld)
Since you are technically outsourcing your lead generation efforts to another party, this gives you more time to focus on other projects and think of new ways to generate traffic for your business. But, it is important for you to watch any affiliate partnership you develop closely. Are they promoting your brand or offer appropriately? Are they incentivizing traffic (you may or may not want this)? So while working with affiliates is a great way to generate quality leads, it’s not simply set it and forget it.
Brand Development/ Getting Noticed
In affiliate marketing, you are essentially placing your ad on multiple websites, giving your brand more visibility on the web. This can help your business get noticed and potentially be thought of as an industry leader in your niche.
Easy Tracking
Since each affiliate link has its own personal identification number, it’s easy to track each affiliates’ performance. By knowing how each affiliate is performing, you can provide necessary suggestions to help them optimize the campaign. When you let affiliates see their performance metrics, it encourages them to optimize their site and the campaign to generate more leads.
More ways of generating traffic
Each affiliate has their own thoughts on how they would like to promote a campaign. By outsourcing your lead generation to affiliates, you are provided with more marketing efforts, whether it be email, banner, SEO, PPC, text link, social, etc.
After attending a sold out Affiliate Summit a couple of weeks ago,I realized just how big affiliate marketing has become. With over 4,000 attendees, all looking to monetize their traffic and/or generate traffic to their offers, it’s evident how profitable this industry has become.
So why not give affiliate marketing a try today?
