Business owners who know how to use affiliate marketing properly know that it is a great way to extend their brand beyond their immediate reach and increase quality traffic to their sites. Affiliate marketing describes a way of working with other brands and individuals with the goal of increasing your brand’s exposure and sales. These affiliate sites can include couponing sites like RetailMeNot and Groupon, but also can be blogs and other social or news outlets.

Couponing websites like RetailMeNot and Groupon are great for affiliate marketing because they don’t cost anything to join. What does cost money, however, is the commission. Every time a customer uses your coupon from RetailMeNot or Groupon, you are charged anywhere from three to ten percent commission. This may seem like a large chunk of money to pay for a coupon, but these sites are so popular that they will surely draw customers into your website. This is also less expensive than pay per click marketing; however, pay per click campaigns can effectively compliment affiliate marketing efforts.

An additional way in which you can use affiliate marketing to your advantage is to have your content listed on blogs frequented by the demographics you’re targeting. For instance, if you sell tennis balls, you may want to get banner images or links to your website on a blog that caters to tennis players or teams. The influence blogs wield can be huge—almost everyone reads them at one point or another. In fact, it’s likely that you can even recount some of the blogs you’ve most recently visited. If you can establish a relationship with the operator of a blog which is visited by your potential customers, you can effectively position your brand and products in front of the audience most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

While affiliate marketing may seem simple, making the most of available opportunities and commanding your army of affiliate marketers requires a considerable amount of attention and expertise. Knowing exactly which blogs to target and which coupons sites to contact can prove difficult without a team of experienced affiliate marketing specialists. Also, managing the cost from several different affiliate marketing sites can be problematic. Additionally, if traffic to your site does increase, knowing how to best focus on the productive affiliate partners while pruning away the ineffective ones requires thorough analysis of your affiliate campaign.

Here at 216digital, we understand affiliate marketing and can help develop the optimal strategy to get you more business through this proven marketing technique. Our clients who use ads on RetailMeNot and Groupon benefit from increased traffic that your business can also tap into. We will get to know your business, analyze your website, and work to understand your customers in order to help us customize an approach for your marketing campaign. Become the next 216digital affiliate marketing success story and join our team today.