The Six Best Strategies for Affiliate Marketing in 2024

1. What is affiliate marketing?
2. You should know these six affiliate marketing strategies in 2024
3. The essential tools and software for successful affiliate marketing
4. Conclusion

Affiliate marketing remains one of the most popular ways to generate a continuous income online. This channel benefits greatly from the growth of e-commerce.

At Grailify too, we gave a lot of thought to monetising our project in the early stages in 2016, and finally settled on affiliate marketing.

In this article, I want to share our key strategies that have helped us to successfully run Grailify for over seven years and build our platform into one of the first ports of call for sneaker fans.

What is affiliate marketing?

The OMR glossary entry on affiliate marketing is very good for a short and crisp definition. A brief excerpt:

"Website operators or social media channel owners can use their reach to make money by setting links. They recommend products to their community. In the case of a purchase or even when a user clicks on the set affiliate link, they receive a commission."

Affiliate marketing is therefore a sub-area of online marketing and gives people the opportunity to promote products or services from other companies and be paid for it.

You should know these six affiliate marketing strategies in 2024

In affiliate marketing, companies (advertisers) work hand in hand with advertisers (publishers). This results in two different perspectives to consider.

Since we from Grailify have been successfully practicing affiliate marketing for over seven years now and maintain partnerships with over 100 different retailers and online shops, I feel qualified to view this post from affiliate publisher's point of view.

For this reason, I would like to go into more detail in this article about affiliate marketing strategies from the point of view of affiliates, or publishers.

Community is Key

Online business has countless advantages, but one major disadvantage: there is no walk-in customer that you can rely on. Bakeries or kiosks, for example, often have the advantage through clever site selection that they randomly get customers into their businesses.

In the depths and vastness of the internet, however, you depend on people becoming aware of you and ideally trust you in the long term.

In terms of TikTok, Twitch and Co., it is therefore imperative that you not only have customers, but fans of you or your brand.

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Put authenticity above profit

This point ties in with the community aspect mentioned above. If you look a little closer at the currently most popular social media networks, like TikTok, Instagram or Twitch, you will quickly find that the most successful people or companies often have one thing in common: They are authentic and open.

Companies show the production sites of their products, explain individual steps of product development and generally give deep insights into their business. While successful influencers discuss very personal topics or even regularly disclose their advertising revenues.

Such brave entrepreneurs and personalities are rewarded with real fans. People who trust them.

If an affiliate manages to appear honest rather than accepting every x-believable advertising deal, short-term profit will be forfeited, but a very strong base of loyal fans will develop long-term.

Recognize trends early

Nothing lasts forever. This hackneyed phrase unfortunately applies nowhere else as strongly as on the internet. Developments in this area are so rapid that you can easily get lost if you are not right on the pulse of time.

We had to experience this with Grailify a few years ago.

In 2017, about one and a half years after the start of Grailify, we were able to grow our community on Facebook to over 200,000 users. The organic reach was considerable and we were able to continuously grow our Facebook community seemingly effortlessly through our content.

All that came to an end when Facebook decided at the end of 2017 to throttle the organic reach for companies. The "Facebook Apocalypse" caused reach to collapse. This trend continued into 2018, as OMR documented in a further article about Facebook and Instagram's algorithms.

As an affiliate, it is incredibly important to be aware of one thing: The community or reach you have built on a social network is not "yours". You can be denied access to the people from one day to the next.

That's why you should focus on making access to you and your content as easy as possible and distributing it across as many platforms as you can.

Remuneration is negotiable

As mentioned at the beginning, it's important not to accept every advertising deal, and not to promote products, services or companies you don't trust.

However, sometimes it's hard to promote a product or service that's actually very good but offers unattractive compensation.

We have found that the remuneration is by no means set in stone, but should rather be understood as a negotiation basis. In most cases, when we could provide good KPIs to the advertiser, the company was able to noticeably increase our commission.

Doubling of the commission is not unusual.

So if you're considering turning down partners because the offered commission doesn't look attractive to you, you should first get in touch with the company and start negotiations. You'll be surprised how often you get much better conditions.

Know your contact persons

By now, you've hopefully understood why it's so important to build a friendly and honest relationship with your community. It's also just as important to know the contact persons of the affiliate programs you're promoting to your community.

At the end of the day, there's a person taking care of dozens, perhaps even hundreds of different publishers.

If you have a partnership with this person, the affiliate partnership is also more solid and you may even benefit from exclusive advertising campaigns or commission increases.

Exchange in e.g. monthly calls about current developments, look at the performance of the past month together and talk openly about good and negative developments and the next steps. In this way, an anonymous collaboration between two companies becomes a personal business relationship.

Diversify your income

While Affiliate Marketing has many advantages you are ultimately still dependent on the success and development of an external company. If the company is doing badly, you will inevitably earn less. We have also often seen partner programs shut down.

Although we at Grailify are by and large advocates of this online marketing channel, we too diversify our income.

Spread your income, if possible, over multiple affiliate programs. Consider developing your own products or services or placing classic display advertisements.

There are a multitude of different possibilities. Even though this article is supposed to inform about affiliate marketing strategies, one of our strategies is to diversify our income.

The essential tools and software for successful affiliate marketing

Over the past few years, we have tested countless different tools and software. These are now indispensable for our daily work:

Later is a social media scheduling app that is also accessible via desktop. Originally developed for Instagram, you can now also schedule and publish posts for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and even TikTok via the platform. This allows us to effortlessly plan several days of social media content in one afternoon.

Hootsuite is a heavyweight in the field of social media. With over 16 million users, the platform is the most used social media management platform worldwide. The goal of Hootsuite is to manage "all" social media channels in one place. We mainly use Hootsuite for communicating with our community, reporting, and "boosting" social media posts with additional budget.

For creating new graphics or advertisements, we use Canva Pro. This tool is unbeatably user-friendly.

Affiliate networks, like Webgains are the interface between advertiser and publisher. They provide the tracking technology, regulate the payouts and often also provide contact persons. Most companies that are interested in partner marketing are registered with at least one affiliate network.

Popular Affiliate Networks & Platforms

ADCELL

Webgains

Awin

Ingenious Technologies

impact.com

Admitad

MyLead

Rakuten Affiliate Network

100partnerprogramme.de

Conclusion

Even in 2024, affiliate marketing remains one of the most popular online marketing channels.

Numerous people and companies use affiliate marketing to generate their income. How sustainable and high the income ultimately is depends on the choice and implementation of the affiliate marketing strategies.

I hope I was able to give you a good insight into our mindset. Through the combination of the affiliate marketing strategies and tools shown above, we were able to build Grailify into what it is today.