In fact, many companies eagerly vie to be the first brand you reach for when looking to fulfill your basic daily needs. Companies want to capture your attention from an early age in order to ensure your brand loyalty, and consequential consistent purchasing habit, for a lifetime.

As an affiliate, you can benefit from these corporate branding strategies by pushing products with strong market brand power. Strong branding increases conversions in the following ways:

Familiarity

Consumers are historically only driven to make a purchase after multiple exposures to a brand or product. If they are seeing a brand for the first time, chances are, that won’t be the time they decide to buy that brand’s product.

Trust

Part of a strategic branding campaign involves building a consumer’s trust and emotional connection to the brand. The top-selling brand in any range of products won’t necessarily be the one with the highest quality and best value; often, in fact, the top-performing brands have simply developed a trusting relationship with their consumers. You’ll often hear consumer purchase decisions are based on trusting, emotion-driven contexts; “My mother always used Dove soap,” “My friend Joe swears by Valvoline to keep his truck running.”

Loyalty

Once trust has been established, a company needs to ensure that their brand delivers consistency in the quality of their product. Once trust in a brand has been introduced and established in the market place, the brand needs to ensure that their product always delivers on its trust-based promises in order to remain a constant in their consumers’ lives.

Considering Branding When Selecting an Affiliate Program

Alongside basic things like creative offerings, affiliate support and statistical reporting, one of the key considerations when selecting programs is to promote brand strength. By promoting trusted brands, you’ll be reinforcing your own brand’s strength, thereby creating a winning association.

• Drive online sales at a lower risks/costs than impression-based or cost-per-click advertising: and
• Better target the right users at the right time.

This time around, I’m going to look at some considerations you need to make when choosing an affiliate marketing partner/service-provider.

There are two ways you can approach setting up an affiliate program:

1. You can join an affiliate network, or
2. You can white label affiliate marketing software and set it up yourself.

Each of these approaches have their advantages. Before advertising your products on an existing network, however, you need to weigh your brand and range of product offers against that network and its model.

Size and Scope of an Affiliate Network

The first thing you should consider when looking into partnering with an affiliate network is its size and scope.

While some affiliate networks are very broad and feature every kind of product and company, others are narrower in scope and specialize in specific product verticals.

If you set up your affiliate program through a broader network, you will probably get access to many more affiliates and your campaign can get much wider reach. However, it will be more difficult to find the right affiliates with the targeted traffic to promote your product.

On the other hand, setting up your affiliate program through a network that specializes in a specific vertical will make it much easier to find affiliates experienced in that niche. If you have a diverse range of products to promote, however, a specialized network might limit you from offering other products through that same affiliate program down the road.

Affiliate Account Support

Another thing you need to consider when choosing an affiliate network is the community behind the network. Some affiliate networks are more self-serve oriented, others are more relationship-focused. This impacts both the level of support you get as an advertiser as well as the kind of affiliates you get access to.

Relationship-focused affiliate networks will often focus on affiliate recruitment, campaign promotion, and technical support for advertisers as well as account management for affiliates. Niche content publishers value these relationship-based networks; consequently, the affiliates on these networks tend to be more interested in long-tail and niche promotions as well as developing long-term relationships with the merchants they promote.

On more self-serve style networks, you’re more likely to come across affiliates whose content is broader and more general sites. These broader-appeal affiliates tend to be driven by commission structures rather than merchant relationships. These are often better suited for brands with a very vast array of product offers or regular seasonal promotions.

For instance, a department-store-style merchant might benefit more from a self-serve network. However, a merchant that is advertising focused product offers such as only women’s wear, only sports equipment, or only electronics might benefit from working with a network that focuses on helping affiliates monetizing their niche content.

A final consideration you need to make is technology: what kind of software is powering the network, and how can it help you reach your marketing goals? This last consideration is sufficiently important that we’ll discuss it in its own post next time.

• Online retail is getting a lot more competitive;
• Affiliate marketing is a relatively low risk (i.e. cost) way to maintain a competitive edge; and
• The medium is a much more legitimate online sales strategy than some perceive it to be.

In this post, I’ll elaborate on the second point and discuss how affiliate marketing is an online sales/marketing strategy that is based on results

Why Affiliate Marketing

The two most important part of any marketing campaign is that:

• There is a way to measure results (ROI); and
• It targets the right demographic.

Since affiliate marketing is a performance-based model, it does both rather well because:

• You only have to pay for ads when they actually convert into a sale; and
• It allows you to target the right audience when they’re in the right mood.

Pay Only for Performance

To recap: through affiliate marketing, merchants/advertisers deploy their ads through a network of affiliates. Affiliates in that network who are interested in promoting that product place those ads on their site.

If a user clicks on an ad, a cookie is used to track them over to the advertiser’s site. If the user ends up making a purchase, the affiliate gets a commission on that sale. If the user doesn’t purchase anything, there is no cost to the advertiser.

In this respect, affiliate marketing is like tapping into an army of freelance salesman that work only on commission. Even if shady affiliates are advertising your product, it’s not going to cost you to advertise on their site.

Better Targeting

Because affiliates only get paid when their ads convert, the affiliates that are going to promote your product are going to do so because they have targeted traffic. In other words, they are already running sites with content that’s relevant to your product line.

For example, if you’re a cloth diaper retailer with an affiliate program, I, as a content publisher, will only join your program if I have family-oriented traffic. If, on the other hand, I have adult or sports traffic, I don’t stand a chance at making a commission through your ads because none of my users are going to click on your ads.

Consequently, your ads are distributed according to user-demographic and mindset/mood. Users on affiliates’ sites are only there because they are actively interested in your type of product at that moment.  It’s like you’ve got hundreds or even thousands of tiny, highly-targeted boutique sites on the internet aligning your product offering with relevant content.

One of the things that has made affiliate marketing a popular and smart choice for product marketers recently is the rise of blogging.  A number of bloggers are looking for ways to earn money for their efforts.  By placing affiliate ads on their highly targeted niche content, they have a low-effort/potentially high-value way to earn commissions.

Choosing the Right Network

Of course, just as every retailer has its own business model and range of product offerings, so does every affiliate network. Although most any affiliate network will likely welcome you in, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to connect you with the right affiliates to promote your product.

There are a number of other considerations you need to make when shopping around for an affiliate network, I’ll be taking a look at what those considerations are in my next post.