#HowTo – How To Explain Affiliate Marketing To Your Friends

Welcome to November – and in full swing of Q4!   This month, we’ve themed our blog with a collection of “How To” posts, which will sometimes be about Affiliate Marketing… and sometimes be fun things (see Fun Friday).   Hope you enjoy!

What is Affiliate Marketing? I will go out on a limb here and say that everyone involved in the Affiliate Marketing community has had difficulty answering this question at some point in their career. Seems like an easy enough question to answer doesn’t it? YOU know what it is, and it seems very straightforward to you now that you are so close to it. During my first few years in the Affiliate industry I often took the easy way out and would just throw out descriptions like “I work in online marketing”, or we help retailers increase traffic and sales.” It was a cop out and it didn’t always work because in most cases people would dig deeper and want to know more.

 You probably have your own answer for this question, but for those of you out there that still struggle with, I wanted to throw out a few suggestions on explaining this concept to folks outside of the industry. My descriptions are almost always from the network perspective since I have worked exclusively at ShareASale throughout my career in Affiliate Marketing, but these descriptions can be easily spun so that they come from the Affiliate, Merchant, and OPM perspectives as well.

Describe Affiliate Marketing To:A Tech-Savvy Friend

 We connect online Merchants with people that run content sites or blogs (We call them affiliates). The retailers or Merchants pay commissions to the bloggers, when a sale is referred from an Affiliate’s site. Our job as a network is to track the activity between the two parties and let the retailers know where their sales are coming from when referred by Affiliates. We then ensure that the Affiliates get paid the appropriate commissions.

Example: Let’s say you’re an avid camper and you blog about the various camping trips you take with your family. On your blog, you can promote merchants with products related to your site and audience of readers. You might promote merchants that sell tents, grills, hiking shoes, etc. When you send over a visitor from your blog that makes a purchase on the merchant’s end, you receive a commission on the referral.

Describe Affiliate Marketing To: A Less Tech-Savvy Friend

 When describing what I do to less tech-savvy folks, I will usually use the same description but combined with an offline example to drive the point home.

Example: Let’s say you drop in your local library to find a certain book that you have been dying to read. It turns out the library doesn’t have the book in stock, but, Janet, the librarian, tells you to go over to the local bookstore and tell them that Janet from the library sent you and said your bookstore is the best thing since sliced bread. In this case, Janet is the Affiliate and the local bookstore is the Merchant. You head over to the bookstore to buy the book and tell them Janet referred you. The bookstore gives Janet a commission as a token of their appreciation for referring you.

Why It’s Important

 It’s important to be able to describe your industry and your role within it. The person you’re explaining it to might turn out to be a great connection for your business, or know someone they can refer to you as client or partner, so don’t take any short cuts. Giving a more detailed description will allow you to make a stronger first impression on a new potential contact, and you might even turn on a light bulb that wouldn’t have been lit up with a more generic explanation.

Make sure you go that extra mile next time someone asks what you do. What are your methods for explaining Affiliate Marketing? I’m always listening to how others describe it to pick up pointers and fine tune my approach. I’ve been at this for 10 years and I’m still not sure that my wife understands what I do. I’m going to blame that on her listening skills!