This guide will walk you through the basics of affiliate marketing: what it means and how to get started as small business.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a type of performance-based marketing where a business rewards its affiliates for each conversion brought by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

What conversion means depends from case to case: sale (e-commerce), sign-up (SaaS) or even website visit (blog).

Let’s look at the following example:

The website X has 150.000 monthly website visits, with an average time spent on the page of one minute.

The business Y is interested in an affiliation deal with X. The deal will take a variation of this form:

Y will pay an amount of money for each conversion coming from the website X’s marketing efforts, either a fixed amount or a percentage.

In a lot of cases, there are two parties involved, just like in the previous example: the advertiser (brand, retailer, merchant) and the publisher (or the affiliate)

Of course, with the complexity of this channel comes the opportunity: there are agencies specialized in this type of marketing, but it can be done in-house at a small level.

Benefits for the parties involved

Let’s have a look at the advantages and the disadvantages from both perspectives:

The Advertiser (Brand or Retailer)

Advantages

Disadvantages

The Publisher (The Affiliate)

Advantages

Disadvantages

How to implement it, and what should I look at?

This section will go through the process and metrics you should look at when picking your affiliate partners.

Step 1 - Brainstorm potential affiliates

Before we start, check this example here.

Keep track of all the potential affiliates with a comparable Excel doc. or whatever similar software comes in handy for you. The idea here is to keep it organized.

It’s time to think about this:

What are some blogs, news outlets, or other businesses which might have the same or similar target audience as you do?

Or:

You sell the product X, which caters to this audience; where can you find this audience on the web, what blogs, news outlets or businesses are talking to them?

Example:

The business X sells leather wallets for men. The blog Y talks about accessories for men, including wallets, watches, even tech gadgets or cologne.

It seems that this might be a place where the audience is interested in what the business X sells.

Write down all the options you know here.

The whole idea of the brainstorming process is to find partners with an audience that might be interested in the product you offer.

Step 2 - Go the extra mile

Google Search

After you have written down all the options you know, it’s time to look for more with Google. First, write down all the words that describe your product, your niche and what it does.

We will call them keywords.

Product Example: leather wallet for men

Keywords: men style blog, men fashion blog, men magazine, etc.

You might end up with somewhere between 5-20 keywords which is more than enough. We can insert them into Google and see what results come up.

Around 85% of the results will not be relevant for various reasons. But you should be able to find some potential partners to start with. Add them to your list.

Similar Sites

After we exhausted the keywords, we can go the extra mile and use a tool like similarsites.com.

This tool lets you discover similar sites, competitors, or websites with associated content. This is a great tool to find the last bits we could not see with keywords or brainstorming.

Plug in the potential affiliates you already have on your list, and this tool will generate similar results.

Facebook or Instagram

Have a look on Facebook and Instagram using the keywords you used earlier for Google or search by similar hashtags. Do a diligent search here too.

Once you find a potential affiliate, do this: go on their Profile → Following → Suggested

The Instagram algorithm will suggest similar accounts to the one you are checking right now. This is a pretty clever way you can discover potential affiliates.

Note: you can start in any particular order you want; don’t forget to add all the possible candidates to your list.

One more thing: in some cases, you will not be able to find the contact details of the person in charge of affiliates if they have one or they don’t show it on the website.

In this case, use hunter.io - you only need to know the website, and you can quickly discover some of the emails you need.

Step 3 - Contact them

We have our list, we have their emails, and now it’s time to get in touch. First, check the templates at No. 4 to get a hold of your person of interest.

Step 4 - The Metrics

Before you start contacting them, consider a few more things.

Below, check the metrics you need to look at when deciding to work with affiliates:

Step 5 - The Incentive

An incentive will offer the audience an extra reason to come and sign-up or buy from you. Offer them a discount that makes sense financially for you.

It might be 10% or 15% or more; this amount depends on your cash-flow and margins. We saw great results in our A/B Testing when we offered incentives to the audiences we advertised compared with times we offered nothing. (wow)

Plus, you can track precisely how many sign-ups or sales you get from each affiliate with a discount code. Every time a discount code is used, it gets tracked in the dashboard. This is easy to set up; most e-commerce platforms and payments providers offer this option alongside tracking.

Our suggestion here is: push for a free trial.

Try to get your banner or advertisement up for seven days or longer and track your conversions from this campaign before committing to something full-time. Sometimes, potential candidates will push for one day as a free trial, which does not work from a data point of view.

Templates

The first rule - be concise: this is cold emailing, don’t beat it around the bush, or your email will end up straight in the Bin.

The second rule - make sure the title of the email commands attention - we get dozens of emails daily, and for most of our Inbox, we skim read it, so make sure your title gets the attention it deserves

Now let’s have a look at the actual email campaign.

Outreach Email

Follow-up [1]

Follow-up [2]

Follow-up [3]

Important to keep in mind:

Use software like PersistIQ or HubSpot to set up these email marketing campaigns; you don’t want to do this manually. Cold emailing is tough, so you must be patient and keep the campaigns running.

We suggest sending a maximum of four emails per week, no more than that. From our experience, most of the time, the persons contacted are either way too busy, or they think the emails are spam.

Most of the email software on the market will show you the Open Rate and the Reply Rate.

A reasonable open rate is a sign of not ending up in spam first and then good Headers for the emails. On the other hand, if the reply rate is low, you either need to work on the text, they are too busy to reply (that’s why you are persistent), or they are not interested.

Here is a short recap of the email marketing campaign.

If you don’t have their email addresses or if, for various reasons, you get no replies, try to get ahold of whoever you are interested in via: forms on their website or Linkedin, Facebook or Instagram. use a short intro template for that, don’t make it too long (similar to the follow-ups above).

Persistence is vital, but you need to give proper timing to your reach out the initiative. You want to be persistent but not annoying.

Tracking

In this case, we have two options, which are known to us:

We suggest opting for discount codes, as this is very easy to set up and efficient in tracking. Even if it’s a minimum discount of 10%, it will offer an extra incentive to convert and better monitoring for you.

Notes

We mentioned this a couple of times throughout the guide: Affiliate Marketing can become very lucrative if done right. And by done right, we mean negotiating a good deal with the right business partner, a partner with the right and engaged audience. A good deal also means it’s profitable for him; business only makes sense when both parties involved gain.

One thing to mention is that sometimes, Affiliate Marketing depends on the industry. So there might not be that many potential business partners out there or the ones out there; they don’t have the right metrics.

In this case, don’t stress it out and focus resources on exploring other growth channels.

Last thing on our list: it takes time to find the right affiliates; it might be actual months until you manage to build the lists, the campaigns, end up on a call and finally get a deal in place; this is a full-time job most of the time.

Make sure to be patient in setting this up.