5 Safety Tips Before Finding Affiliates

Ensuring Safety in Affiliate Recruitment: 5 Tips You Should Follow

Affiliate marketing can be an effective way to drive traffic and increase sales, but only when it’s done correctly. Unfortunately, affiliate marketers are sometimes viewed as spammy or unprincipled because of the negative experiences some users had with affiliate marketing partners. Luckily, it is just a slight, not critical flip side of affiliate marketing. As a matter of fact, there are many benefits for your business from partnering with affiliates. Affiliate partnerships have the potential to expose your brand to new audiences who aren’t currently familiar with what you have to offer.

If you’re thinking about creating an affiliate program for your business, check out these tips on how to do it responsibly and ethically.

Before you start, understand the risks

Affiliate marketing is a fairly low-risk strategy in the sense that you’re not responsible for managing campaigns or paying out large sums of money. But there are still a few important risks to keep in mind. You spend time on recruiting affiliates, but there is no guarantee that they will deliver the exact amount of traffics (or sales) you expect. Some affiliate partnerships resemble gambling. You’re dependent on someone else’s actions to make money. Affiliates can (and do) walk away at any time. If they decide they don’t want to be affiliated with you or your company anymore, they can simply stop sending traffic your way. There’s no contract that can guarantee an affiliate will stick with you for the long haul. To improve the relations with affiliates and motivate them to work with your product long, you need to ensure the integrity of your product, the product message (CTA), and the affiliate offer.

Also, keep in mind that most affiliates do not work exclusively with you, they also have a portfolio of other products they promote. If you decide to partner with affiliates, make sure you only work with people promoting products you would be proud to recommend to your readers.

Be honest with your affiliate partners

Affiliate partnerships are a relationship between two businesses. You’re not tricking anyone into buying a product or clicking on a link. Affiliates are partners who are providing a service to you. They’re sending you visitors to your website and increasing your sales in return for a commission. When you partner with affiliates, be honest with them regarding your product, its benefits, and its strongest points. If you’re promoting a product you don’t believe in, a potential customer will be able to tell. Make sure you only partner with affiliates whose credibility you trust, and, further, also approve other products and services they promote. Affiliate marketing can be a great way to increase product sales while only doing a small amount of the actual work. You can use it to get more traffic and drive sales to your own products and services. But you have to be honest with your customers and affiliates.

Only work with companies you trust

It’s always a good idea to only work with affiliate marketing partners you trust. You want to make sure that you partner and promote your product through sources and individuals that align with your brand’s values. Affiliates you partner with should represent you and your business well. It’s better to take your time finding the right affiliate partners than to rush into a bad partnership. It’s important that you work with affiliates whose products and services align with your brand. That’s not to say that you need to work with affiliates selling the products relevant to your industry. You can find an affiliate partner who offers something different than what you do, but who is still a good fit for your website and readers.

Don’t use affiliates to drive spammy traffic

You can tell when a website is sending tons of low-quality traffic to another website. You’ll see lots of pop-ups, lots of ads that interrupt your reading experience, or tons of low-quality comments on blogs and other websites. If you’re working with an affiliate who is using spammy tactics to attract visitors, you could end up damaging your reputation. If you find yourself working with affiliates who are sending a lot of spammy traffic, it might be time to reevaluate that partnership. It’s not worth it to partner with sites that drive tons of spammy traffic. On the contrary, it could significantly damage your reputation. 

Check your affiliate partners’ track record.

Before you partner with an affiliate, see if they have a track record of success. You can check an affiliate’s track record by looking at their affiliate account from the network they partnered with. Some networks have a page where affiliates can track their conversions and ROI. Find out how long affiliates have partnered with the network. See how much they’ve earned in total and what their average conversion rate is. If affiliates have partnered with a network for a long time and have a high conversion rate, they’re probably running affiliate campaigns right.

Double-check everything before you publish it.

Even if you’re only working with one or two affiliates at a time and aren’t really managing those relationships, you still need to follow basic business protocols. Make sure you have contracts in place with your affiliates. Some affiliate networks will have contracts you can use, but you may want to draft your own agreements for certain affiliates. Make sure you’re clear with your affiliates about their role in your business and what’s expected from them. Make sure you have a system in place to manage a partner program, track conversions, make payments, and communicate with your affiliates, for example, IREV.

Don’t rely on affiliate marketing for most of your advertising efforts

Affiliate marketing has a tendency to be cyclical. You’ll have a few months of really high conversion rates, and then, for whatever reason, that conversion rate will drop significantly. When you rely on affiliate marketing for most of your advertising efforts, you don’t have a lot of control over the traffic you’re getting. You don’t have control over all landing pages the timing of the ads, or the products readers are clicking through to buy. Though there might be some exceptions depending on which technologies you use for tracking and management. For example, IREV Lead Distribution system allows you to create customized landing pages and manage the data collection and further use this data to distribute your leads to the right advertisers.

When you rely too heavily on affiliate marketing, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. Affiliate marketing is a great way to supplement your other marketing efforts and get additional traffic to your website. But it shouldn’t be the only thing your company does as product promotion.

Wrapping Up

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to drive more traffic and sales to your business, but it can only work if you do it the right way. That means being honest with your readers and partners, only working with companies you trust, and making sure you’re not just pulling in sales from low-quality affiliates. The choice of technology for managing and tracking affiliate campaigns. Keep these tips in mind to make sure your affiliate marketing efforts are successful. Affiliate marketing can be a great way to bring in new customers, but only if you do it right.