5 Mistakes to Avoid When Opening a Business

Today we consume digital content more frequently and actively than in the past, and the trend indicates that it will continue to grow exponentially. But how can we use this trend to sell?
It is not a secret that to create a strategy for your
company it is first necessary to recognize your target audience and know how to
communicate with them. This is what affiliate marketing is responsible for ,
one of the tools to contact your audience in a directed and almost organic way
in a digital space that you frequent.
If you want to know this concept in depth and know how it
can help your business, I encourage you to continue reading!
Affiliate marketing is a system where an
"affiliate" offers or advertises a good or service in exchange for a
commission for conversions or other metrics such as visits, leads, scheduled
appointment, etc. These "affiliates" can be blogs, content creators
or other pages related to ours.
It's simple, right? It is almost the same as a salesperson
of your company who goes only for commissions. Now, the magic of affiliate
marketing is that these "affiliates" are not sellers and, in
addition, it is an automatable system , so it will require an effort at the
beginning, but if it is considered properly it can be managed without requiring
it over time. .
Before deciding that affiliate marketing is what we are
looking for in our strategy, let's look at some advantages and challenges of
affiliate marketing.
• Brand
visibility in digital spaces.
• Search
engine optimization (SEO) product of backlinks.
• Increase
in sales, leads, followers, etc.
• Endorsement
of an opinion leader.
Affiliate Marketing Challenges
• Custom
creation of the affiliate program: commission percentages, calculation payments
per conversion, etc.
• Time and
resources for affiliate tracking.
• Attract
the right affiliates.
Since we know what it is about, what advantages we will have
when implementing it and what are the challenges that we will have to face, the
next step is to know if it is convenient for you and your company. Do you meet
the following requirements?
• You have
an ecommerce.
• You have
calculated the value per sale.
• Your
target surfs the internet.
If you answer yes to all of them, congratulations! You can
incorporate affiliate marketing into your marketing mix to improve your
results.
There is more than one way to implement affiliate marketing,
the ideal is to design the plan for you. For this, you have to follow different
steps that I will explain below, do not miss it!
Affiliate marketing: steps to create your affiliate program
The first thing is to define which metric is most valuable
to you . Here are some examples that can help you define this point:
• If you
have a high resale value or a high average ticket , you may want to commission
per closed sale.
• If you
offer a service or a product of very high value such as cars or apartments in
which the client normally makes a contact prior to the purchase, you will want
to commission by scheduled visit.
• There are
also companies that pay a sum for the traffic directed to the page every
certain number of leads.
As you can see, the commission indicator should be
calculated solely by the purchasing behavior of your customers.
To calculate the commission, you must first be clear about
the cost of the product and its profit. If you have already decided that the
commission is given for conversion or purchase, the usual is 5% or 10% .
But beware! Always calculate the costs. We don't want to
lose money on cost, unless you know it will pay off thanks to the high buyback
value of your product.
There are programs, such as Affise and similar, that
automate the relationship of commissions, referral limits so as not to go over
budget, and help to calculate commission value and others. These tools are very
complete and charge monthly payments according to your needs.
But if you want a low-budget strategy and you have the time
to design your own plan, you should not worry because it is not complicated: we
only need a tracking URL and have our website connected to Google Analytics.
To create a tracking URL you can use this free Google tool ,
where you are going to specify the campaign and the affiliate. Once created,
you share it with the affiliate partner and in your Analytics tray you will
find real-time measurements of traffic, pages visited, conversions and
everything you need to know about the behavior of the leads of each affiliate. The
rest of the process can be manual, depending on the number of affiliates you
have. The tracking URL is sent to each one and, at the end of the agreed
period, the commission and the quality of the leads are calculated.
Many companies choose to add a section on their website
"Do you want to be an affiliate" . This usually works because
creators are constantly looking for new income opportunities. Also, since their
goal is to grow a community that trusts them, you will very rarely find
affiliate requests that have nothing to do with your brand or niche.
Another option is to create a database of influencers ,
blogs and digital spaces that your target audience visits. This can be more
expensive and does not guarantee a positive response from those contacts;
however, if you already have a solid foundation to believe that they are places
of value for your clients, it is worth exploring.