Nowadays, every business needs to expand. Sales teams are developing new tactics for their business to increase sales. If affiliate marketing wouldn’t have been profitable, it couldn’t be a billion-dollar industry. However, apart from money, it has many more advantages.

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Affiliate marketing was established in 1994 with one goal in mind – to make money. Although it’s 2021 already, and you may feel that affiliate marketing is an ancient tactic, but it still works. In this article, we will talk about its key advantages.

Why do small companies use affiliate marketing?

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While companies of all sizes can and make use of affiliate marketing as a promotional tool, it can be especially beneficial to small businesses. It is a form of outsourcing that enables brands to tap into a wealth of marketing expertise within their niche without wasting additional resources. 

This is due to the fact that it is a performance-based system, which ensures that companies only pay for outcomes rather than direct ads. Advertisers’ partners (also known as “publishers” or “affiliates”) drive traffic to the affiliate offer but only earn a fee if a transaction is made (i.e, the customer has converted).

How to get started with affiliate marketing

The simplest way to get started is through a reliable affiliate network like, which can offer a wealth of assistance, resources, and advice, alleviating tension for small businesses entering this landscape for the first time. 

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The network will assist in the development of the affiliate program and will promote it to their registered publishers. They also make sure that all publishers who join the affiliate program are given a unique tracking code, allowing for accurate payments and tracking.

Businesses seeking to step into the affiliate sea without a network, would have to manually set up the affiliate marketing software and reach out to publishers, which is time-consuming. 

It is also more difficult to find quality publishers on your own since the network requires all publishers to go through a selection process before being approved.

The Main Advantages of Running Your Own Affiliate Business

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Now, let’s see what are the key advantages of affiliate marketing for each party involved.

Advantages for Advertisers

Advertisers must pay a piece of their earnings to affiliates and affiliate networks. Nonetheless, the advantages of this approach outweigh the low costs involved.

These advantages include:

  • Customers are acquired at a low cost: There are many commissioning models, but the most popular is that advertisers pay only when a sale takes place.
  • Fixed costs: Network fees and affiliate commissions are usually fixed and can be easily added to the product price.
  • Increased brand visibility: Your ad will appear on all of your affiliates’ websites, increasing your brand visibility.
  • Potential customers: Since affiliates choose only advertisements applicable to their own audience, all customers who come via the affiliate link are potential leads.
  • SEO improvement: Affiliate marketers will be creating a lot of content and backlinks around advertiser’s offers, attracting more visitors and increase advertiser’s SEO rating.

Benefits for Affiliates

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Many people use affiliate marketing to produce passive income. For some of them, this can result in weekly earnings of thousands of dollars.

An essential foundation for your success is a viral website or blog with a lot of interesting and valuable material.

Here are some of the advantages that affiliate marketing provides to affiliates:

  • No upfront costs: There are no upfront costs to begin advertising as an affiliate (especially if you have your own social media accounts and/or a blog).
  • Passive income: Since websites and blogs are online all day, affiliates can earn money even while sleeping.
  • There are no risks, and there is no need to spend money on these projects. You can always make changes and change direction without losing anything.

Benefits for Customers

Most affiliate marketers overlook the fact that this form of marketing often benefits customers, who are the most important link in this chain. 

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These advantages include:

  • Good advice: Bloggers and webmasters often promote products that they use and enjoy, thereby providing valuable and insightful reviews of the product/service.
  • More content: Many affiliates build special pre-sale pages with a lot of product information and high-quality (real) photos.
  • Discounts: Affiliates often post promotional items on their pages and, depending on the relationship with the advertiser, can provide visitors with special discount codes.

As you can see, affiliate marketing is a mutually beneficial business for all the parties involved.

Now let’s see, what are the main advantages of running your own affiliate business, because affiliate marketing has many other benefits in addition to offering a marketing strategy for small businesses. 

1. Affiliate Marketing provides (indirect) social proof

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Online consumers depend on social evidence more than ever before when making purchase decisions. 

According to research, online reviews play a major role in the process, with approximately 95% of shoppers reading reviews before making a final purchase decision. They trust publishers who have developed a rapport with an engaged audience. As a result, when they have a review of an affiliate product, it provides reliable social evidence for the product and brand.

As an advertiser, this will allow you to get more reviews and mentions of your product, absolutely free.

2. Affiliate Marketing Has a High ROI

Affiliate marketing has a very low expense per sale as compared to, for example, Google Ads. 

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Depending on the niche, a sale through Google Advertising will cost up to 20x more than a sale via affiliate marketing. 

Affiliate marketing has a substantially higher return on investment due to the policy of only paying commissions on sales rather than paying for traffic, as is common with Google Ads or other ad marketing types.

In other words, your affiliates may drive many visitors to your websites, but you will only be paying once the actual order will be placed. You won’t have to pay in advance for driving those people to your website.

3. Affiliate Marketing Broadens the Audience

Each publisher with whom the advertiser collaborates already has a well-established audience. 

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Affiliate marketing allows advertisers to reach an otherwise untapped audience and thereby expand their own. 

These new (and very targeted) markets would have been difficult to reach with other types of advertisement, but the variety of publishers with which marketers may collaborate helps with expanding the overall reach. 

These new audiences then become a permanent part of your brand’s lead base.

4. Affiliate Marketing Builds Brand Awareness

What company doesn’t want their brand to be known and easily recognized by as many people as possible? 

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As I have already mentioned, thanks to affiliates’ continuous efforts, your brand name will be mentioned over and over, as affiliates will work towards building content and ads around your company’s affiliate links.

As publishers drive more traffic in, the brand’s reach and overall popularity will grow. This makes the company more identifiable and contributes to the consumer’s trust.

5. Affiliate Marketing is inexpensive.

As an advertiser, you only pay a percentage off for the revenue produced by and publisher in a performance-based model. This percentage is often set and monitored by the affiliate marketing software the company is using.

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This prevents money from being squandered on ineffective promotional strategies. 

Businesses pre-determine their commission rates, allowing them to know exactly how much each transaction would cost them. Very few affiliate plans are designed to pay for leads or other actions. The majority is designed to pay per sale. 

It can be difficult to calculate how cost-effective the price of a sale is in other advertising types, but it is easy in affiliate marketing.

6. Affiliate Marketing Builds Partnerships with Experienced Salespeople

Small companies often cannot afford a dedicated internal marketing department. 

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Affiliate marketing enables companies to gain access to a variety of expertise and experience through the publishers with whom they collaborate. 

This can lead to a number of different practices, allowing the advertiser to partner with some of the best in the industry. Many small companies will be unable to afford to hire such a professional workforce themselves. Any business can gain access to a pool of skilled and established publishers through affiliate marketing.

7. Affiliate Marketing Allows Accurate Data Tracking

Knowing how your company is doing allows you, as a brand, to make potential steps to improve it. 

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Affiliate marketing tracking offers substantial and valuable insights into where consumers come from, what they buy, and more other details, through data collection made by affiliate software such as Scaleo.

All of this is easily accessible to the business through the affiliate tracking process. This data will assist companies in making essential improvements to their websites to increase conversions or deliver better creatives and collaborate more productively with the best-performing publishers.

8. Affiliate Marketing Improves SEO

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To drive traffic to an offer, any publisher promoting a company links back to the brand website. These outbound links are useful to search engine optimization and help to boost the website’s organic rankings. 

If your publishers have very high ranking websites and create high-quality content that provides value when linking to your product, this can have a significant impact on your Search Engine Optimization in both short and long run. Sharing the link on social media is also beneficial, particularly if the audience shares it across different accounts.

9. Affiliate Marketing Provides Full Control Over Your Business

Affiliate marketing enables any company to have full control of its marketing efforts when delegating promotional work to publishers. 

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Your company can set its own commission levels and bonuses, and it can leave the rest the publishers. Any company may choose which publishers to partner with, and on the other hand, signing up inactive publishers has no effect on the bottom line. You can also cut off low-quality affiliates who send bad traffic to your website.

If your company does not use affiliate marketing and hires a team member who does not achieve the desired results, it would be a costly mistake for your brand.

10. Easy Integration With Other Marketing Techniques

The best part about affiliate marketing, is that it does not have to be seen as a stand-alone marketing strategy. 

Instead, it may work in tandem with other forms of marketing to improve any promotion or campaign. When your company focuses on a specific product and has a great affiliate offer, it can send it to publishers, who can then help with advertising campaigns and increase demand.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is advantageous to both the affiliates (publishers) and the businesses (advertisers) and even the end customers. Running a small business can be fun and satisfying, but it is not without its challenges. 

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Gathering enough money to market a small business is one of the most difficult challenges. Affiliate marketing has many advantages, and implementing it into your business strategy will not only help you handle your marketing budget more efficiently, but it will also maximize your brand’s reach to a whole new audience. 

When viewed as part of a larger picture, affiliate marketing has many beneficial side effects, such as brand awareness, and search engine optimization, and data collection. If affiliate marketing isn’t already in your arsenal, now is the time to incorporate it into your business. Else you risk falling behind in the dynamic world of digital sales, because affiliate marketing is only available on the internet and is used in almost all types of online stores.

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Do you want to try and add an affiliate (referral) section to your brand? Check out Scaleo – we offer a 14-days free trial.

Last Updated on May 24, 2023

Author

Elizabeth is a Senior Content Manager at Scaleo. Currently enjoying the life in Prague and sharing professional affiliate marketing tips. She's been in the online marketing business since 2006 and gladly shares all her insights and ideas on this blog.