That is where you and your affiliate manager need to come in so that your company still grows – and you get to choose who is and is not allowed in your program.
Affiliates Are Not Your Employees Or Your Sales Team
Affiliates are contractors of your company, not employees. They are not held to the same standards as sales professionals, such as hitting sales goals.
Affiliates in your program are working on their own dime vs. getting a guaranteed payment for ad space, promotions on a set schedule, or a media and advertising fee.
If the affiliate has their own traffic and is not intercepting your own, they control where it goes, and you will lose out on customers if you cross this line with them.
Work with your affiliates to get promotions at important times, and ask what they need. If they have a niche audience, create banners and videos that meet their audience’s needs.
If they know a specific word or phrase resonates with their audience, they will use it to get their audience to your website.
If they’re not breaking the law or making misleading claims, let them share their brand equity to build trust for your company. That is where a big value-add happens.
Affiliates Have To Link To My Website Or App
Affiliates do not have to link to your website or app – or exclusively to you. This is because they own their own web properties.
If the affiliate introduces new customers and doesn’t rely on your brand to have its own traffic, it decides who gets the traffic and sales, not you.
One important thing to remember is that Google’s reviews update rewards multiple shopping options. If the affiliate is not creating branded content like coupons, reviews, etc., linking to multiple vendors for the same product will likely benefit them.
This includes shopping content and gift guides, listicles, and even where to pick up supplies for creating a recipe or fixing something around the house.
Affiliate programs take a lot of work and are a high-risk but high-return channel when done in a value-adding way.
If your SEO tanks or social media channels are shut down, your affiliate partners, who have their own traffic, can help keep you in business while you recover.
That’s why it is important to invest in it, but you want to invest in it so that it attracts people to you and does not intercept and counteract your own efforts.
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