In your affiliate marketing journey, you will encounter many different people. In order to make sure you succeed in this highly competitive environment, it is essential that you be familiar with the different types of individuals involved. Knowing how they think and act will allow you to better predict their actions and gain a competitive edge over others.
Each group is different and poses its own type of challenges. By understanding how the different types of people behave, you’ll be better prepared to handle them and land on their good side. Since having affiliates is the best path to success this is exceedingly important.
Let’s look at the groups now.
* The Affiliates
The affiliates, who can also be seen as publishers, are pretty much just like you. These are the people who create niche websites, run YouTube channels, or even host Facebook groups. And of course, publishers who use paid advertising are a great example of someone you will find promoting affiliate links as well.
There are many publishers on the internet looking to serve up relevant content or ads. These publishers could be classified as your ‘competition.’ As an affiliate marketer and publisher, you must monitor them carefully, learning from them to develop strategies for making more money with affiliate marketing and publishing.
In the world of publishing, it’s important to know your competitors. By staying aware of what they do and how they tackle similar challenges that you’re facing, you can always learn from their successes or failures and apply what you learn for future campaigns.
If you have a website dedicated to fishing, where you tailor your content to promote fishing-related products, webpages showing up on the first page of the search results that deal with similar content are your competition. They could be affiliate sites or actual brand name companies selling their products.
While they are competition, remember they can also be allies. If you move from affiliate sales only to making your own products, they can become part of your sales force.
This is where the types overlap a little because affiliates can sell their own products too. Let’s look at the next group to get a better picture.
* The Advertisers
The ‘advertisers’ are essentially the company whose products you promote. They recruit affiliates such as yourself to sell their products and brands to consumers. They may also advertise on their own, often in different markets such as TV commercials or web banner ads to boost their sales.
When an affiliate marketer adds their own product creation to their sales pipeline they find themselves transitioned to the advertisers group. Similarly, a company that sells food and publishes lots of recipes on its website or app is a publisher too.
The groups overlap. The important thing is that fellow publishers are your competition for affiliate sales, you can also network with them to promote their products as an affiliate if they’re vendors too. Likewise, they can prmotoe your product as an affiliate. Competition just becomes a mutually beneficial relationship.
One problem with affiliate marketing is although you’re promoting someone else’s product, the same vendor might end up ranking for certain keywords that you’re targeting! So now not only are you competing for those keywords against other vendors of your product; but there’s also a major conflict between you and the vendor whose products that you were promoting.
Ah, the tangled webs we weave! It’s generally considered a bad move for companies to compete with their affiliates, so any time you spot it happening you should immediately reassess your marketing strategies. If you feel the conflicting partner is a vital part of your campaign then perhaps it’s time to start considering how much they’re costing you in lost sales due to too much competition.
* The Consumers
This group is indisputably the most important of the three. The consumers are the people who come online and look for helpful information and solutions to their problems. A great majority of them aren’t looking to spend money or buy stuff.
They want help. Your job is to help them by providing just enough information to help them solve their problems. Then, you provide a taste of something better to help them without requiring them to do everything themselves.
Weight loss is a huge niche. A good affiliate site in the niche contains content about how to lose weight. It discusses dieting and exercise. It lays out the long, hard road to losing weight that most people face. After that, it tells them about various products, diets, and suppliments that will help.
The visitor has some information that will help them. They have also been subtly introduced to a product that will help them along the path.
What do you think they’ll do?
Count calories, run laps, and do squats for the next three months… or check out the suppliment that should double their success?
They’re almost all going to check on the suppliment. The content you provide will be the vehicle that takes people through a journey of their own – the invisible journey that they take to go from reader to buyer. By understanding all of the different people involved in this process, you’ll figure out your strategy so that it is much more effective.
If you’re struggling to put together a story of your own reach out to me. Not only am I involved in internet marketing, but I’m also a fiction author.