How to Use Affiliate Marketing for Ecommerce to Blow Up Your Brand: 6 Powerful Insights

Affiliate markting is something every ecommerce brand should be taken advantage of. And I’ve personally used it to make millions for my ecommerce brand, Eric Javits.

In this blog post affiliate marketing for ecommerce, I’ll walk you through step-by-step how to get started with affiliate marketing, what tools to use and how to use different forms of affiliate marketing, to make a ton of moeny for your brand.

Let’s dive into it.

What is Affiliate Marketing for Ecommerce?

Affiliate marketing is when a person promotes your products on different platforms. And in return, you give them a percentage of the sales.

For exampe: if you own a fashon store, like I do, you might agree to a pertnership with a fashion blog website or a well-known individual. You and the blog owner would create a unique affiliate link that takes the customer to your product page.

By tracking the number of conversions, the blog gets a percentage of sales which motivates them to drive more customers to your store.

This is one of the best ways to increase traffic on your ecommerce sites and generate massive revenues and sales.

Here is how to get started:

How to Get Started with an Affiliate Marketing Program?

Getting into affiliate marketing is pretty straightforward.

Several online affiliate network platforms like Rakuten, CJ affiliate, Impact, Partnerstack,and so on.

They offer affiliate marketing options to ecommerce brands. For my ecommerce D2C brand, Eric Javits I used Rakuten Advertising. So we’ll talk about that.

Top Affiliate Tracking Platform: Rakuten Advertising

Rakuten Advertising is the most incredible platform for affiliate marketing because:

• it offers a diverse range of publishers
• a clean user interface
• and most importantly, it tracks everything for you.

It also lists down all the publishers you’re working with and shows their performance in graphs. Giving you a clear idea of which publishers are working the best for you and which of them could be bringing better results.

An important thing to note here is that Rakuten in itself is not an app for affiliate marketing.

It only offers you access to publishers whom you can contact and make deals for affiliate marketing of your product. But this in itself is a great advantage because you won’t have to find publishers that are related to your products individually. It has all kinds of publishers so it doesn’t matter if you are a fashion seller, a tech seller, or have products of any kind.

You can find a list of suitable publishers such as blogs, loyalty rewards websites, discount offers websites and much more.

Once you have indentified and jotted down a list of publishers the next step is to pitch them your product. And what you are offering in exchange of them publishing your products on their platform.

Pitching Your Product: Setting Percentages / Commission for Publishers

My ecommerce brand, Eric Javits, is working with several different publishers like

• American Express
• AfterPay
• Discount Code

and tone of others.

The commission percentages vary from publisher to publisher, and obviously, the bigger the publisher, who get hundreds of thousands of readers on their online platform, chare usually more.

So the way forward is to pitch your product to the publishers, give them an idea of what percentage you’re willing to pay them in exchange for their service and you continue doing this with as many publishers as you want.

It alll depends on the size of your ecommerce business and how big of a percentage you can feasibly take out of your proiduct price, to pay to the publisher as a commission.

I pay anywhere between 5% and 25%, depending on how much traffic a publisher has. And so far, it’s working great for me.

In just one month, I made north of $133,000 in sales, and I paid less than $6,000 in commissions.

The insane thing is that this was a 157% increase over the last year’s affiliate marketing numbers for my ecommerce brand, Eric Javits.

These numbers show that affiliate marketing does wonders and when you do the cost benefit analysis, you’re not paying a lot for the return you’re getting.

So talking from my experience Affiliate Marketing is something that every ecommerce online business brand should get into if they want to make a pay.

Another crucial thing is these commission structures are to be paid on a monthly basis. Or it could be sometimes a one time thing.

This entirely depends on what kind of contract you negotiate with the publisher. This is important to remember because you’re going to be paying the publisher and you don’t want to get into any trouble here.

Always make the payment methods and schedules clear!

Affiliate Site: “Rakuten for Qualified Ecommerce Brands”

Anyway, keep in mind Rakuten is not the only app or affiliate program platfrom that you can use. Several other platforms offer the same affiliate program service, like CJ affiliate, Impact.

However, I use Rakuten personally so I know that it works great.

Now, I know Rakuten is a relatively expensive affiliate program platform, charging at least $500 or more per month. Moreover, they only accept ecommerce brands that are bigger.

Since my ecommerce brand qualifies for it I use it and I find it easier that the other platforms, but this doesn’t mean that you must also use Rakuten to find and contact publishers.

Other platforms work great too. So if you’re a beginner or your store is relatively new you might not be able to use Rakuten or CJ, but many other affiliate marketing platforms are still available for you.

For big stores willing to pay for Rakuten it’s one of the best investments because it yields excellent results.

After you sign up as an advertiser on Rakuten, CJ or other affiliate marketing platforms, the next step is to create a network.

Creating an Affiliate Network

You want to create a network of your best performing affiliates because those have the potential to drive your sales.

For example: As a fashion seller, you can target fashion blogs, diverse content websites, cashback apps buy now, pay later apps like Afterpay and other similar platforms.

The basic idea is to either market your product to customers who are on the internet looking for fashion advice and learning about the latest fashion trends, or paying customers who are looking to get a great deal on products.

This approach allows you to market your product to a vast array of potential customers, and ultimately, the sales will start to come in.

Important Tips for Affiliate Marketers

Fashion blogs and content creating websites are a must.

But shopping aggregators are also equally important. Shopping aggregators usually have multiple online stores integrated into their app, and they offer discounts on products.

Discounts are a great way of getting paying customers because everyone loves getting a deal on any product they purchase.

Therefore, getting into affiliate marketing with several platforms is a must, because the more you push your company’s product on the internet, the more sales you generate.

Just imagine, creating a network of sites that are talking about your brand.

Once this marketing efforts are done, your affiliate marketing strategy is set and you’re ready to move on to the next level.

Now you can start getting into the different programs that Rakuten itself offers for example.

Ecommerce Affiliate Programs

A great way to track customers who use credit cards is through the Rakuten Card Linked Offer Network, also known as CLO.

The CLO network basically works with different bank cards and offers discounts on your company’s products.

For example: The Rakuten CLO works with Amex cards meaning that, if you get on this network, and create an affiliate link, your product will be marketed to all Amex card users in the US.

They also work with multiple other banks and cards, so it’s great way to promote your product to wealthy people who have credit cards and will potentially buy your products.

I mean, only people with serious money have Amex cards so it wouldn’t hurt to market your products to them.

All of this is what Rakuten offers, and if your ecommerce store is eligible to be accepted into Rakuten my suggestion is that

• Get it done as quickly as possible.
• It si a great investment and if you’re not ready to day out $500, you can use other affiliate program platforms.

Regardless of what platform you choose, affiliate marketing is essential to your business.

Talking about the essentials, influencer marketing is also a great way to generate sales.

Influencer Marketing

This is the most commonly used method of affiliate marketing today.

Going with the flow does work sometimes, and because influencer marketing yields results, I also use it for my ecommerce brand, Eric Javits.

I do it a little differently than others, and I’m going to tell you how.

Most brands and ecommerce stores usually reach out to the most common influencers they’ve seen on Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook and they pitch them their product and send PR packages.

That’s the old school method of asking influencers to promote your products. And while it may work, it doesn’t yield the desired results.

How to Generate Massive Sales from Influencer Marketing?

How do we get the best possible result and generate massive sales from influencer marketing?

This is where the LK platform comes in.

LTK is the greatest app for getting access to influencers in the fashion space because it omboards a to of them. You can select the categories of influencers that are associated with your company’s products.

That way, you know that you’re sending your products to people who have the following of customers who are interested in products like yours. LTK is very strong in the fashion space.

For example:

If you run a clothing brand for women, sending PR packages to beauty influencers will now work.

Finding the right influencer is a hectic task, but LTK makes it easier for you. I used this platform personally for my brand and I have seen some incredibly great results.

On LTK you can check out the impressions, reach and results from the affiliate links of fashion influencers or whatever influencers you have contacted and hired to promote your product. It’s directly connected to your Rakuten too, so every click made my visitos or customers is tracked.

Giving you a complete insight of what the trends are and what products or influencers are working the best for your ecommerce store.

That’s it!

My Summary

You have affiliate marketing platforms like Rakuten to reach out to publishers, create a network of those that work the best for your brand, create affiliate links, and basically market your products to the masses by paying commissions.

Additionally, there are various other ways to market your products.

If you’re interested in discovering the marketing tools and platforms that can help you promote your products effectively, take a look at this blog post I created:

Marketing Automation for Online Business: 5 of the Best Tools

It covers the top five marketing automation business tools I used to generate $2.5M in revenue in just one month

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