Marketing

Is Affiliate Marketing Still an Effective Marketing Tool for Niche Businesses?

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Affiliate marketing is nothing new. It has long been a tool to reward businesses and savvy marketers, particularly niche businesses. Agencies such as Eventige understand the difficulties of marketing niche businesses such as e-cig businesses. There are limits to what you can do to promote your products, so it pays to look at all your options before you create a marketing strategy. In this article, we are going to look at whether affiliate marketing is worth trying for a niche business.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Like many businesses, you may employ sales personnel to sell your products or services. Affiliate marketing works in a similar way. Affiliate marketers link to your products and if they make a sale, you pay them a commission. Amazon has affiliate marketing down to a fine art and more than 40% of its annual sales are generated by affiliate marketers. As a niche business, you can learn a lot from this strategy.

In the past, affiliate marketing had a dubious reputation. There are a huge number of disreputable sites out there that promote products. Many of these sites are poorly made and contain little of value to the customer. This is extremely damaging to a brand. After all, do you really want your brand associated with a spam site? No, of course, you don’t.

Benefit from High-Value Websites

This situation is set to change. Affiliate marketing is helping businesses of all types increase their market share in a crowded marketplace. Since Google began cracking down on sub-standard content across the web, quality website publishers have increased while below standard websites have been penalized and have subsequently disappeared.

Your niche business can benefit from the increase in quality websites. By connecting to webmasters who are looking to target a similar audience to your business, you can take advantage of their SEO and marketing capabilities while they earn a healthy commission for selling your products.

What are Your Competitors Doing?

Take a look at your competitors. Are they already running an affiliate marketing scheme? If so, the method works, and you need to get on board as soon as possible. As your marketing options are limited, you need to embrace methods you might not have previously considered.

Of course, affiliate marketing is not all plain sailing. Like any marketing strategy, affiliate marketing has its pros and cons. As we have already touched upon, not all affiliate marketers operate above board. Some use black hat techniques to boost website traffic, including email spamming and false advertising. Your brand message is very important, you need to make sure you vet all affiliate marketers before you let them join your scheme.

It is also worth mentioning that affiliates often use PPC advertising to promote their sites, so if you are also using PPC to promote your niche products, there will be some overlap. However, since all sales help your bottom line, this is not a huge problem.

If this is your first time, join an affiliate marketing network. They are more suited to small businesses.