There are many reasons why you should start affiliate marketing business in Kenya. Recent market data shows that affiliate marketing in Kenya is becoming more popular every year. It started gaining in popularity because of its unique performance-based nature.
It practically costs nothing to have an army of sales people promoting your products and services online. You only pay when they bring in a sale, and they are rewarded based on their performance. It is a win-win business relationship.
This evidence alone shows the genuine interest of entrepreneurs and businesses in Kenya to become more familiar with affiliate marketing as a means of generating profit and gaining recognition.
Affiliate marketing is considered to be one of the best marketing programs out there since it comes with a cost-effective and measurable approach to long term results that have no immediate risks.
Benefits of Starting Affiliate Marketing
Whether you started your blog with the intention of making money or not, inevitably you’ll start hearing about how bloggers are making passive income with affiliate marketing and it sounds exciting. And it is exciting, because passive income is one of the many benefits of affiliate marketing for your blog.
I mean, don’t we all want to make money while we sleep?
1. It's a Win-Win Scenario
Τhe vendor and the affiliate partner both come out as winners from this partnership because they both get a percentage of the sale. The partnership is designed in a way to serve both needs – the needs of the vendor and the needs of the affiliate.
What’s great about it is that all requirements are explained through an agreement that takes into account both sides and offers the best solution for both.
But it can also be beneficial between you and your readers, too: because you get a commission, but they might also get a special discount or offer because of your affiliate relationship.
Yes, you can ask your affiliate manager to offer perks or discounts that are exclusive to your customers! (Especially when you’re already sending them sales on a consistent basis.)
2. It Expands Your Target Audience
Promoting your products to a niche network that’s bigger than yours is counted as an advantage. Your audience’s number is never enough compared to your affiliate partners network combined.
Affiliate marketing increases your exposure and allows your brand’s name to get out there in ways that it’s impossible to do so otherwise.
If you do have products, courses, ebooks, etc. that you’ve created yourself, you can recruit affiliates to help you sell them, too!
With technology these days, it’s actually easier than ever to sell your products via affiliate marketing. It kind of depends on where you are and how technically inclined you are
3. It Helps You Increase Your Search Engine Results
The more the affiliate link leading to your site gets shared by your affiliates, the more publicity and exposure you will get on Google search results. This boosts your advertising efforts from the targeted marketing plan you have in place for your online business and brings you one step closer to your next customer.
Checkout how search engine works
In conjunction with your other marketing efforts, recruiting affiliates to your program will allow you to scale traffic faster. In addition to a higher level of referral traffic, you can almost always expect a boost to your direct and organic traffic as well
4. It's Cost Effective
These days you can start a blog for free (though I don’t recommend it) on a free blogging site such as blogger. But even if you go the paid route, starting a blog can cost as little as under $10 (800Kshs) for a domain name (a.k.a. URL) and around $5 (300Kshs) a month for hosting your site. Just about everyone can afford that.
Check the best hosting sites here.
Though harder, you can actually do affiliate marketing without a blog. You can do this by sending traffic directly to affiliate offers. I caution against this, however, because in the long run you’ll be losing money. It’s better to at least have a landing page where you can get a prospect’s email address before sending them off to an affiliate offer.
5. It Helps To Become More Professionally Independent
With affiliate marketing, you don’t have to solely rely on selling your products directly from your blog or the other marketing campaigns you have on the side.
Becoming a merchant and working with affiliates means that you get to appoint your marketing efforts and expand these outside of your ‘local’ online store. This offers the potential to become known in the higher tiers of the online market.
6. It’s Passive Income
One of the best things, in my opinion, about affiliate marketing is that it’s (mostly) passive income. For instance, you might write a blog post once, but if you incorporate affiliate marketing in that post, you could get paid for it for months, or even years to come.
In some cases affiliate marketing is not passive income. Like when a company is doing a “limited time” launch, so you, as the affiliate, have to do a lot to promote the offer before the cart opens until right before it closes.
But, in most cases, affiliate marketing income is passive income.
7. It Doesn’t Require Much Experience To Start
It’s easy to learn how affiliate marketing works. Also, it’s not rocket science in terms of skills, knowledge, and experience you have to possess. Like any other type of marketing, it probably requires a lot of trial and error to learn all the tricks to mastering it.
Also, one of the most significant benefits of using an affiliate program to market your product is that you don’t need a huge pre-launch following to start selling from day one.
8. It (can be) Recurring Income
Some affiliate companies include recurring commissions. Which means that as long as the person you refer stays a paying customer, you receive a commission on the sales.
Recurring income is ideal because it helps stabilize your blogging income. Yes, some people you refer will leave these programs, which is why it’s smart to continue to promote them. But even if they stayed on for 3 months on average, that’s 3 affiliate commissions compared to one affiliate commission for non-recurring payments.
9. Affiliates Can Boost Your Reputation
By partnering with trusted bloggers and reputable websites, you can further the reputation of your brand and its products. These partners will champion your products and, in our opinion, will further solidify consumer confidence in your product or service.
While in the research phase of a purchase, consumers are more likely to trust a 3rd party’s opinion over content produced directly from the site selling this product. Consumers also have a certain level of trust in websites they frequent for product recommendations.
10. You Can Create Multiple Streams of Income
While many bloggers or niche site owners start affiliate marketing with Amazon (probably the biggest affiliate program of them all), there are a number of affiliate programs in Kenya that you could promote.
Checkout the best affiliate Programs to Join
Obviously bloggers aren’t signing up for thousands of affiliate programs, and I’m not suggesting anyone do that! But I like the fact that you can sign up with multiple companies to be an affiliate.
When you’re first starting, especially, I recommend finding 2-4 “core” affiliate programs you’ll promote. These core programs should be things you like, use, and can honestly recommend.
There are exceptions to this… or rather, a different way of looking at it. For instance, if you want to promote clothing from Target, you’re not going to (typically) buy and wear everything you’re promoting. But if you love Target and shop there all the time, that would be a great fit.
Conclusion
There has been a lot of debate around the ethics and practices involved in
affiliate marketing. Since anybody can put up anything on the internet these days, this type of online promotion can often include scams, like get-rich-quick schemes or marketing of phony training, courses and other digital goods of really low quality.
As with any industry, there are the good, the bad, and the ugly
marketers, so you always need to have a way to qualify your business partners before you start working with them.
Affiliate marketing can be a very effective, low-risk investment to help expand your marketing efforts beyond a small business’ traditional bandwidth. For the reasons listed here, affiliate marketing is almost always worth the investment and can take your online store to new heights.
Are you already utilizing affiliate marketing? How is it going? Feel free to reach out in the comments below with any questions or comments.