While most of the focus of affiliate marketing has been on brands, publishers have enormous opportunities to embrace this channel and grow their businesses. As consumers look to content to guide their purchasing decisions, they are in a strong position to expand their monetization options by helping brands engage their valuable content and audiences.
And technology is evolving to address the needs of publishers so they can take advantage of every revenue opportunity. Here are four areas where it can make a difference:
- Grow your partnerships and opportunities faster. The faster an advertiser partner can be onboarded, the faster both parties benefit. But onboarding has traditionally been a one-way process with brands determining who to work with and then initiating publisher partnerships. At impact.com, we’ve turned that around. Publishers can now connect with brands they want to work with without having to be part of an affiliate network or on our platform. Publishers can offer their own white-label programs, which provide advertisers with a link to quickly set up an account at no cost to the advertiser. This reduces the time frames to get partners up and running. This allows publishers to engage directly with the brands they can support and easily onboard them without relying on third-party networks – meaning both can start monetizing faster.
- Automating your payment and performance reporting. Even if a publisher has in-house technology to support elements of its partnership program, when it comes to proving performance and managing partner payments, most rely on manual approaches. But invoicing, extracting data from multiple networks and Google Analytics, and developing reports remains resource-intensive and time-consuming. Meanwhile, it is challenging to track content performance and provide the regular reports that brands need to monitor the success of their activities and prove the value of working with a partner. This is a big problem for many publishers, so take advantage of automated technology that solves it.
- Maximize the value of your current – and past – content. Broken links and out-of-stock items quickly destroy the value of e-commerce content. And for consumers, these are huge frustrations when they want to buy the products they read about. But aside from this annoyance, finding an out-of-stock item leads them to go elsewhere to buy it, depriving the brand of sales and the publisher of commission. Publishers should invest in technology that automatically checks links and inventory levels so that broken levels can be updated and out-of-stock items can be redirected to another brand or similar item. This ability to respond automatically, without going into the website, is critical for publishers to maintain sales and not lose opportunities.
It also increases the value of content. Some publishers top earning affiliate articles may be several years old. But while consumers may still discover or refer back to them, how often do publishers undertake the time-consuming process of checking and updating the article links? Now it’s easy to do. By automatically applying link updates, they can take advantage of mid- and long-tail opportunities by ensuring that the content remains relevant, up-to-date and profitable.
- Improve your commission income. How writers create branded content for your advertiser partners, your technology should enable them to optimize the content creation process by automatically providing them with these links to support the articles. They should also be able to identify the links that generate the highest commission based on the article’s theme so you can maximize the income potential.
Grow the partnership channel for everyone
While impact.com may be recognized as delivering a platform to support brands, as a technology business we develop tools that grow the entire partnership channel. And to do that, we need to support both sides of the market. If not, we stifle the channel’s development.
So we focus on providing the best tools for the different needs of advertisers and publishers, so both sides thrive. And for publishers, that means moving to offer what they need – a fully integrated suite of affiliate marketing tools controlled from one interface.
