What is affiliate marketing? in eCommerce, affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products or services.
The affiliates searches for a product or a service they enjoy, then promote it on their website, blog, social media, Youtube Chanel, … and earns a commission from the publisher for each sale made. The sales are tracked via affiliate links from one website to another.
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What’s the difference between a referral program and an affiliate program?
Referral marketing implies a close relationship between parties, for example, close friendship or/and family connection. However, in affiliate marketing, there is no existing relationship between the affiliate and the referred people. They can be influencers, Youtubers, bloggers, …, etc. But in general, both referral marketers and affiliate marketers do the same thing: recommend products or services to others, and get a commission or a reward for doing so.
The benefits of an affiliate program for Shopify merchants
Shopify is the most used and the largest eCommerce platform on the market today. with more than 1.2 million users around the world, Shopify is versatile enough to be used by small, medium and enterprise-level companies alike to set up and manage online businesses to sell services and products.
But unlike eCommerce marketplaces like the giants ebay and amazon, where the marketplace help the users market their products easily, on Shopify it is up to the merchant to use his own strategies to drive traffic to his online store.
There are some Free ways to drive quality traffic to its online Shopify and there are some paid ways like Google ads Facebook ads, Bing ads, sponsored posts, … and among the best ways to drive high quality traffic to its Shopify store, there is an affiliate program, in this paragraph, we will showcase the main benefits of affiliate program for a Shopify store owner.
1- Increase the traffic to your store
When an affiliate signup to your affiliate program, the affiliate will starts advertising your products and services at his own cost, the benefit for you as a Shopify store owner, is that you will get some new and high quality Free traffic toward your online store.
2- Increase the Domain and Page Authority
Commonly referred as (DA). The Domain Authority of a website describes its relevance for a specific subject area or industry. It is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. This relevance has a direct impact on its ranking by search engines, trying to assess domain authority through automated analytic algorithms. Whereas Page Authority (PA) measures the predictive ranking strength of a single page, Domain Authority measures the strength of entire domains or subdomains.
If the affiliate post some do-follow links on his blog for example, and the blog has a good DA/PA, your own DA/PA will then increase, which increase your SEO score by consequence.
3- Increase your backlinks
A backlink is simply a link from one website to another. Search engines like Google and Bing use backlinks quanlity and numbers as a ranking factor in their search engine algorithm, because when a website links to another, it means they believe the content is noteworthy.
High-quality backlinks can help to increase a site’s ranking position and visibility in search engine results, and having a high quality backlink from an affiliate will undoubtedly increase your own ranking on search engines.
4 – Brand awareness
Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions.When you have an important number of affiliates, you will surely have a large amount of external blog articles, Youtube videos and any other type of recommendation that will increase your brand awareness, and people from all around the world will easily recognize your business and can be confident enough to buy from you.
5 – Increase your sales and lower your expenses
Getting high quality backlinks, increasing its Domain and Page authority as well as getting more traffic will result in one thing : Increase your sales
The main goal of any eCommerce business is making orders and increasing sales, but a business owner also study the market and try to find the less expensive way to promote his business and products, and an affiliate program is one the cheapest way to increase a business sales, the fees to setup and maintain an affiliate program running is very tiny compared to the results you will get if you know how to do it efficiently.
In the next paragraph, we will feature one of the best affiliate program app as well the basic setup process
How can I get started with affiliate marketing?
If you are on Shopify already, just add the Affiliate marketing app by Secomapp to get started. You’ll have 14 days of free use to get set up and see how you enjoy the app.
1- Installing the app
Just like any other Shopify app, affiliate marketing app is extremely easy to install and to get you started withing minutes, once you add the app to your Shopify store, it will take you through an onboarding process that will get you up and running with an affiliate program catered to your business.
2- The affiliate program app benefits
Once you have installed the app and added the basic information, the app dashboard will allow you to have a full control of your affiliate program, starting from enabling the commissions to managing the payouts, below is what the app is offering to you :
- Build multiple commission offers
- Build your affiliate/ ambassador team
- Communicate with affiliates
- Creatives upload
- Provide media assets to help brand ambassadors promote your store efficiently
- Track affiliate performance through:
- Control referral order:
- Reporting and analytics
- Easy payout
- … and other advanced options:
How to find the right affiliates for your Shopify eCommerce store ?
After you’ve known the benefits of an affiliate program and its importance to increase your brand awareness and your sales, and after having figured out how to create an affiliate program, you’ll need now to recruit the right kind of affiliates to join it.
1- Through your own website
The first to start promoting you affiliate program is your own website, visitors to your site are already familiar with your brand. Promote your program on your site with a link in an out of the way but still easy to access, a place like your footer is ideal to avoid design mistakes, with a direct link to a page dedicated to the affiliate program where you will highlight the benefits of joining, the perks over your competitors and more important, the commission rate offered, Here’s how we did it for Plak Theme affiliates.
2- Promote it on social media
Announce and feature your affiliate program on your own social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, …), by mentioning the main benefits to joining your affiliate program, you may get some new affiliates.
3- By email
If you are already an established business and have an important email list, you can send an email to your subscribers and customers to let them know about your affiliate program, who knows ? Some of them would be interested and may join your program.
4 – Submit it to affiliates directories
You may not know it yet, but some websites are specialized in featuring other’s affiliate programs, most of those websites come at a cost, but you may find ones who can post your affiliate program for Free. How to find them ? There is no better way than searching for them on search engines like Google
5 – Offer it to influencers
You can contact some influencers, either they are bloggers or Youtubers or any king of businesses or people who are into the same business and offer them to join your affiliate program in exchange of a commission or a one time payment to promote your products to their audience.
Final thoughts
An affiliate program is one of the strongest ways to increase the traffic to your Shopify store, once you’ve recruited your affiliates, you need to regularly communicate with them in order to grow your program and improve it as you grow.
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