Now this one is the biggest for me, but drop shipping will open up new traffic sources and ways to find customers. I have ran plenty of affiliate sites in the past ten years, and I still have some affiliate sites which have generated close to seven figures in commissions alone. Affiliate marketing works, but it’s totally different from drop shipping for how you get people to your site.
Mobile devices become an increasingly integral part of our lives, it’s vital that marketers understand how to effectively communicate on this unique and extremely personal channel. Mobile devices are kept in our pockets, sit next to our beds, and are checked constantly throughout the day. This makes marketing on mobile incredibly important but also very nuanced.
After you have found an advertiser that you want to promote and have signed up for their affiliate program through an advertising network, you will be given hyperlinks to use that will track any sales that you generate. They may also include an image tag that serves as a tracking pixel for you to include in your email. You will write a sales and marketing email to your audience as you normally would for one of your own company’s products and services. Use the hyperlink they provided you as the hyperlink in your call-to-action so that sales are properly tracked. If they provided a tracking pixel, place it in your HTML at the bottom of your email so that the number of times the offer was viewed can be properly tracked by the affiliate program.
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4. Ability to customize your links. When you join a partner program, you receive your custom affiliate link. But what happens if you want to create deep links, in order to direct the referral to a specific landing page? Moosend has taken care of that for you; when you sign up for Moosend’s email marketing affiliate program, you get your unique promotional link, which then can be customized by adding “?url=” at the end, plus the URL you want to redirect your leads to. Again, it’s perfectly fine if you don’t do this; Moosend’s default affiliate link will still take the referred user to the homepage.
In an affiliate marketing business, you only have to promote the affiliate offers of the network you have joined. In comparison with dropshipping where you have to cater to customer support, affiliate marketing doesn’t have any of those issues. Customers only get redirected from your website to the ecommerce [merchant] store through the links and you get a commission.
An affiliate marketing business is an excellent source of passive income. There’s a bit of upfront work to figure out your ads or produce content to help convert the sale. However, once that’s done you can have ads running in the background while you make money. You don’t have to worry about creating a product. You don’t have to worry about shipping a product. All you need to do is make sure you’re sending highly targeted traffic to the merchant’s landing page to drive conversions.
Great stuff here Sean – thanks for all of these insights and sharing some best practices when it comes to affiliate marketing. I’ve never been comfortable giving it a shot, but after reading this post and your perspective on how and when to do it, I may just have to give it a try. Especially considering I’m already mentioning and recommending services and products on my site, I’m just not getting the potential rewards associated with doing so. Thanks again.
At the end of the day, I have two things to say. First, neither option is better overall than the other. It all comes down to how much effort you put into it, what connections you make, what you’re willing to invest, and the fickle vagaries of luck. Second, absolutely nothing says you’re limited to just one or the other. You can always build a dropshipping storefront and augment that income with affiliate marketing. No one can stop you but your competition and your own lack of ambition.
For example, if you’re an Amazon affiliate promoting fashion you can add integrated dropshipped goods to your store. Since you already have an audience, adding a store is an easy way to make money. In addition, the amount of work required for a store is mostly upfront work. This includes adding products to the store and writing product descriptions. Afterward, all you need to manage are your orders, marketing, and customer service. You can even outsource some of the work to make the workload even lighter.
With possibly the most transparent affiliate network online, we give affiliates access to stats no other program dare, including earning data, conversion stats, demographic information and seasonality trends. With ethics and consumer protection being high on the agenda, you can rest assured when working with MoreNiche you are working with an honest, trustworthy and transparent company.
“You need to build an internal calculator. You need to know exactly how your offers convert, so you can make a decision on how much to pay out. A lot of times, vendors will go negative during the first sale, but know their backend so well, that they can recover a lot of that revenue post-transaction, or on a continuity basis, based on your stick rate. Knowing and understanding the lifetime value of your customer will be huge in determining the payout,” DeHerrera said.
