The best affiliate marketing tips for small business owners come from experienced people, not those who regurgitate information they read online and call themselves “experts.” So here we go, folks, the cold, hard truth about affiliate marketing and management from someone with a decade of hands-on experience working with big brands and small business owners. From fashion bags to flashlights, from dog toys to toy dogs, business to business and business to consumer… I’ve seen it all. The most important thing is that I have personal experience.
What’s affiliates marketing?
It’s quite simple actually. It is an agreement between a merchant (the business owner) and the publisher (the affiliate webmaster) to sell a product or service and, in return, share a commission or percentage of the sale. Go to any blog or website and take a look at the banner ads that appear. If they are not a direct ad (ie the advertiser paid to be displayed on that page), they are likely affiliate banners.
History of Affiliate Marketing.
Before social media marketing, affiliate marketing was hugely successful for both big and small brands. It was a very profitable way for business owners to reach out and acquire new customers without having to spend a lot of time or money on finding these new customers themselves. It was a beautiful partnership! Blog owners or affiliate webmasters benefited by earning money from traffic to their websites. The more popular their websites became, the more potential income they could earn. Business owners could focus their attention and advertising budgets on the strategies they knew best and trusted affiliate webmasters to bring them ancillary customers.
what went wrong
Affiliate webmasters who were good at what they did started making a lot of money! Business owners were happy because that meant they were making money and getting new customers too. However, it was the affiliate webmasters who really became the first generation of online marketers. They understood the “rules and metrics” of online marketing much better than the business owners themselves. They mastered the algorithms and guidelines of search engines and email service providers, and quickly learned how to manipulate them. This resulted in stricter SPAM laws and regulations, stricter SEO guidelines, and more advanced SEM restrictions. This is also about the time you held the position of affiliate manager they began to shake in their boots!
Why Social Media Marketing changed the balance.
Social Media Marketing made everyone take notice. For business owners, they now had a very cost-effective way to reach new customers based on customer interests and online activity. In fact, they didn’t. need trust both affiliate webmasters to provide these smaller segments and demographics. It also created a platform for brands and business owners to interact and communicate with their customers directly. Affiliate webmasters also took notice, as their income slowly began to decline. Fewer people were visiting their websites, fewer of their email blasts were delivered to inboxes, and online customers got smarter and tired of clicking on banners.
How the new SEO has changed affiliate marketing.
In late 2011 and early 2012, Google led the way with sweeping SEO changes. Search engines basically changed the way they rank or rate a website. Remember, the higher a website ranks in search engine results, the more traffic you will get! Affiliate webmasters took the biggest hit. Most had a portfolio of 100 or 1,000 websites that they used to generate “traffic” and promote offers and products to consumers. With the SEO changes, most of their websites plummeted in ranking. That meant fewer customers clicking on offers and less revenue to support their business. Business owners also felt the pressure as this steady stream of affiliate sales began to slow down.
In my next article, we’ll learn how you can use affiliate marketing to help increase your brand equity online and acquire new customers.