17. Conclusion

Constantly exploring the possibilities of improving the business is something that comes naturally to everyone running an online business. The online environment is the world that continually changes and anyone who wants to stay in the game needs to follow the changes and adapt. This leads to discovering new opportunities, one of those being affiliate marketing. The starting point is examining your online business and how affiliate marketing can become a part of that business. Depending on the business type, some will choose to be merchants, while others will be affiliates.

Integrating affiliate marketing with your business

The next step is the integration of this business model into your own business. Merchants and affiliates will take different paths when it comes to the integration process.

Merchants

From the moment your products are available to the customers, affiliate marketing can become one of your promotional strategies. There is no perfect time to wait to get started with this since it is a strategy that runs independently from your other business projects. Follow the guidelines mentioned earlier in the ebook, to implement the affiliate marketing seamlessly and focus on:

• Creating and setting up the program
• Developing a strategy to promote the program
• Managing and monitoring the program using affiliate software and/or network

These are the crucial tasks in affiliate marketing that merchants will need to take care of in order to get started.

Affiliates

Affiliates have their own workflow when it comes to affiliate marketing becoming part of their online business. It all begins with choosing the perfect programs. Those are the programs you can benefit from as you drive right people to the high-quality products they will be interested in. The integration continues with the following processes:

• Implementing affiliate links in your content
• Optimizing the content with affiliate links
• Content promotion

As you are discovering the potential of affiliate marketing and how this monetization tactic pays off, you will soon stumble upon new products and programs worth exploring and promoting to your target group. Through content performance analysis, you will also be able to see which promotion strategy works best for your content.

Growing your business with affiliate marketing

In essence, affiliate marketing is a strategy that has a huge potential to grow and help you expand your business. You should not forget that it is still a part of online marketing which makes it directly related to all other segments of online promotion, so it is only logical to expect it to evolve along with other online promotions and strategies implemented. Both merchants and affiliates should focus on several key points to help them grow their business with affiliate marketing.

Expansion

The moment you notice that the affiliate program is a part of your daily business routine and that it shows results, it is time to think about expanding. Merchants will try to provide more products inside the program, to reach more affiliates, to boost the visibility of their program through online advertising, etc. On the other hand, affiliates need to explore more program options, find new products or services to promote and create more content that can help them boost the exposure of affiliate links. They both have one goal in common with this expansion – to increase profit generated through affiliate links.

Involvement

Once the program is up and running, one might think it is time to have a break. Still, the changes happen all the time when doing business online so you can never be away for too long. This also includes management of affiliate marketing. Merchants need to keep an eye on program performance and regularly communicate with the affiliates, as well as to look for new ways to improve the program. Affiliates have to pay attention to their links and regularly check for broken links. Affiliates also need to keep up with the changes merchants may be introducing to their products and services, as well as to create new content that will be a part of the promotions they are running. All of these tasks require both affiliates and merchants to keep monitoring their affiliate marketing strategy and analyze its performance constantly.

Mobile-friendliness

Being mobile-friendly has become a must-have attribute in the online world, which means that affiliate marketing has another segment that will affect its performance. Starting from optimization of web pages for mobile devices to optimization of email messages and leveraging the promotion on social media and apps, targeting mobile users is extremely important for growing your business. Merchants and affiliates should explore mobile optimization and how well their content is adapted for the mobile users. In the end, it all depends on your business and how you manage to integrate affiliate marketing. It is obvious that this kind of promotion shows a great potential, especially with the growing popularity of influencers and bloggers. Creating a customized approach and a plan that is based on your business resources and potential is of the highest importance. This way you make sure that affiliate marketing integrates well into your business and helps you with achieving your goals. Using the power of the internet, you can now expand the borders of your reach with online exposure enabling you to affect thousands and millions of people worldwide. Regardless if you are an internationally known company or a blogger starting out, affiliate marketing is an asset many will find worth exploring. It provides a chance for everyone to succeed in doing business online, as long as you explore and utilize best practices on how to integrate and get the most out of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing has its root in the more traditional type of marketing – door-to-door sales. This type of marketing has proven to be effective and still lives on today in the offline world. Affiliate marketing took this approach online and guess what? It worked. This type of marketing is based on the positive word of mouth. It is proven that people are more inclined to make a purchase if they hear good thing about the products from their friends, family or someone they trust. Affiliate marketing is also a highly lucrative investment for merchants as the risks are low yet potential returns high. This type on the other hand also made it possible for bloggers and video bloggers to monetize their online presence, allowing for a new modern breed of professional bloggers and YouTube stars to emerge, who can now both do what they love and still make a living. If you feel that your business can benefit from affiliate marketing, then you should definitely do a trial run and see how it goes. It might just be the perfect type of online promotion to help your business reach new heights.