How to Start Your First Affiliate Marketing Campaign

 

How to Start Your First Affiliate Marketing Campaign

A newly-created project should manage significant issues to survive the first year of operating. The key target to hit, especially in a highly-competitive market environment, is finding product-market fitting. Affiliate marketing is giving a variety of instruments to reach that goal. And even more: It engages potential customers, who can become a core audience — and some can even become brand ambassadors in the future.

Here are some bulletproof tactics of how to launch a new brand, service or app using affiliate marketing channels.

Related: Use Affiliate Marketing to Create a Loyal Audience

Why affiliate marketing can be an effective strategy channel to use

An affiliate partnership is based on a сost per acquisition model (CPA). The advertisement provides results in the form of sales and target actions, which gives direct profits. Worth noting, the affiliate marketing advantages are:

The absence of reckless risk-taking investments.

Promotion is taking place only among the relevant audience.

The wide range of different niches to be efficiently used.

But the main thing is that the budget spent is under your control. The basic operating principle of affiliate marketing is you get what you pay for.

According to Publift, 86% of audiences are suffering from ad blindness, meaning they simply do not see the ads. To get confidence that the budget won't be wasted on irrelevant clicks (cost per click) or views (cost per view), the affiliate partners' reward depends on the success of the promo campaign.

Having all these advantages of affiliate-based tactics, it's time to roll out our very first affiliate marketing campaign step by step.

Related: An Affiliate-Marketing Program Might Be the Perfect Move

Step 1: Creating an in-house affiliate program or joining a travel affiliate network

Building your affiliate program is not a cheap exercise. However, big brands like Expedia or Booking.com could do that. So looking for a proper travel affiliate marketing network would be a more realistic option. Their framework and experience combined with the right tools should help you as well. The cooperation with external CPA platforms (i.e. Travelpayouts, CJ, AWIN, Partnerize or others) seems more manageable, especially for the newcomers.

Step 2: Propose a suitable affiliate offer

It must be based on an analysis of competitors and companies' ROI models. The proposal should include commission rate, cookies lifetime and payout policy.

The cookies' duration is the length of time when a customer and an affiliate are associated together. It starts from a client's click on the link and may last from one session up to a year. If it has expired, the partner won't receive a commission from a purchase.

Also consider determining a payout policy: a variety of actions, which are taken into account as target ones and being paid. Pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-action (PPA) and pay-per-impression (PPI) models are concentrated on different aims — the number of clicks, lead generation and sales guarantee, respectively.

3. Get a list of top-notch affiliates

The subscribers and followers of a partner should be your final target audience. For example, if you have a coupon service, the potential users' audience from your partners should be interested in travel deals, coupons and discounts. Keep on the influencers with high-quality content. It's okay if they're local bloggers with fewer than 5,000 subscribers, compared to the more popular ones with 1 million or more subscribers.

The figures for the blogger subscribers are not as important as the quality of the audience — the major thing is how many sales a partner can attract. The affiliates with a low traffic volume can also become a great source for your actual sales among the loyal and active audience.

Related: 3 Tips to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

4. Sharing your brand's values with partners

The affiliates will recommend your service to their audience, so they should be aware of your brand values. A simple solution is to create a promo or landing page to share with potential partners. On this page, you can provide product features, strengths, tips, etc. Go even further, and create a media kit with a detailed description. But remember, not all the affiliates are willing to go through a 30-page document. So be sure to create a summary that includes all the basics.

5. Analyze the efficiency of the campaign

Usually, at the launch of an affiliate campaign, it's enough to provide partners with affiliate links. By using them, an affiliate would provide and drive traffic to your site or link for app download. Efficient cooperation can also encourage other ways to contact the audience in the future as well. It could be such effective formats as search forms, banners or APIs. While affiliate partners attract their audience, your task is to analyze the quality of incoming traffic.

The essential point of the first stage is to inspect the affiliate campaign's effectiveness (to improve it for the future). The initial traffic flow and sales will indicate further actions to be done. For example, you can try reaching partners with different target audiences or using additional tools to attract a new audience yourself. You could also try changing program conditions or pushing extra promotions. Traffic analysis is an everlasting process for the affiliate program optimization, as well as the identification of anomalies and possible violations on the partner's part.

Related: How Affiliate Marketing Can Work for Entrepreneurs

Be patient

Affiliate marketing is not a one-shot game. So be prepared for different experiments with advertising formats and channels. Perhaps, you would figure out that social media promotion is a better way than traffic from travel blogs or vice versa.

This process demands flexibility, constant self-improvement and deep analysis of audience behavior. Don't panic if the first results of the campaign don't match your expectations. Launching an affiliate program is just the beginning of a long journey. Affiliate marketing is, in our humble experience, the most cost-effective marketing channel worth taking a chance on.

Best Forex Affiliate Program: Highest Paying Forex Affiliate Networks 2022

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'I was banking on that income': Instagram is abruptly shutting down its affiliate marketing bonuses, which used to pay up to $400 a month

Instagram Affiliate is ending its incentive program on June 30.

Instagram Affiliate, one of several monetization features that the Meta-owned platform has launched in the last year, is the platform's native affiliate marketing tool that allows creators to earn a commission off of sales they drive.

For several months, eligible creators were given the opportunity to earn extra cash on top of the affiliate commissions.

As with other products on Instagram — like Reels — the platform paid a bonus to select creators who used the new feature. Other platforms, like Amazon, have also leaned into this incentive model to get influencers to use their software.

Instagram offered to pay creators a maximum of $400 per month if they shared 10 in-feed posts or live videos using the tool — or $40 per use — according to the company's help desk. That's in addition to any commission earned from the brand. Meta also offered an "approximate commission match" for creators.

Meta declined to comment on the status of its affiliate incentives. However, Instagram's help center says the program will come to an end on June 30 and that all earnings made prior will be paid out.

The platform was also offering creators a one-time incentive of $200 to post affiliate-enabled Reels. Instagram did not comment on if this incentive will also end on June 30.

Instagram's affiliate program has become a lucrative tool for Bethany Everett-Ratcliffe, a full-time creator with 56,000 Instagram followers. 

On Tuesday, she saw a notification in the app that read, "Content and commission incentives from Meta will no longer be available after June 30."

The incentive was a reliable bonus on top of her affiliate earnings, Everett-Ratcliffe told Insider. 

"You kind of become almost dependent on it, like when you're budgeting," she said. "I was banking on that income."

Meanwhile, Camille Carter, a creator with 28,000 Instagram followers, told Insider that the incentives have helped her cover administrative expenses and photographer fees. 

"Although these have been small financial incentives, it felt good to finally get some kind of reward for posting free content for brands, even if the brands themselves weren't directly paying me," Carter wrote in an email. 

Another creator with about 200,000 Instagram followers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Insider that the change won't affect their income since they have only used Instagram's affiliate tool on Stories, which aren't included in the bonus program.

This isn't the first time Instagram has put an end to or drastically changed a monetization program. Earlier this year, four creators told Insider they were making less money than before from the Reels Bonus program, without much of an explanation from the platform.

While Everett-Ratcliffe will continue using Instagram's affiliate feature regularly (in addition to other affiliate marketing platforms, like ShopStyle), she said she won't feel pressured to create 10 affiliate posts in a month for the sake of maximizing the incentive.

Bitpanda affiliate and Bosonic Network announce partnership

Bitpanda, one of the most dynamically growing fintech companies in Europe, and Bosonic, a decentralized FMI (Financial Market Infrastructure) business, have partnered to fulfill the growing need for a UK-based digital asset custodian from institutional customers, Coin Journal learned from a press release. 

European crypto giant Bitpanda acquired Bitpanda Custody, previously named Trustology, in a multimillion-dollar deal in February this year. 

As Bosonic prepares to launch the relevant services later in 2022, Bitpanda Custody will become a member of the ‘Bosonic Cross Custodian Net Settlement Working Group,’ a flagship project in the industry.

It will establish a new payment standard versus atomic swap netting and settlement across an international, institutionally aligned, autonomous custodian network. 

This will do away with counterparty settlement and credit risk between these institutional bodies. Bosonic CEO Rosario Ingargiola commented:

There is great demand for separate custody provided by regulated or qualified custodians with the growth of the market for institutional digital assets, especially from the family office and buy-side world. It is crucial to be able to protect clients’ data and assets, and it’s fundamental to the fiduciary responsibility of these clients. We are overjoyed that Bitpanda Custody is joining Bosonic and look forward to helping them service their institutional clients.

Bitpanda Custody Managing Director Alex Batlin added: 

Bitpanda Custody is delighted to partner with Bosonic to aid institutional clients in reducing settlement risk and costs at the end of the day while improving capital efficiency, all backed by an insured, regulated crypto custodian.

About Bosonic 

Bosonic is a leading dFMI company with offices in San Francisco, New York, and London, founded in 2016. They provide the top-grade infrastructure that eliminates counterparty settlement and credit risk in digital asset markets.

About Bitpanda Custody

Bitpanda Custody is an insured, FCA-registered, UK-based crypto-asset custodian wallet provider. 

Its goal is to make it easier, quicker, and safer for people and institutions to protect and administer crypto assets across blockchains and DeFi protocols.