The COVID-19 pandemic solidified the prominence of e-commerce as the top way to shop instead of just a popular alternative to brick-and-mortar stores. In fact, it's estimated that 95% of purchases will be made online by 2040. But not every company is an e-commerce company. So how can publishers of all types capitalize on the hot online shopping market?
Luckily, the flexibility of the open web means that there are user-friendly paths to securing e-commerce revenue without actually selling products of your own. One of the best ways to achieve this is through affiliate marketing.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based method in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought in by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. From an e-commerce perspective, this often translates into embeddable shopping links, reviews, and specific content like product roundups.
Image from Shopify. Sourced from What’s New in Publishing.
Here’s an example from indy100, powered by RebelMouse. The site’s Wishlist section is full of product roundups of all kinds, featuring products through partnerships with Amazon and Walmart.
While indy100 isn’t selling these products specifically, the publisher receives a commission for every purchase that originated from the Wishlist section on their site.
Why Affiliate Marketing Is Important
Affiliate marketing has been around for quite some time, way before the pandemic, but the past few years have certainly increased its importance in the market. Many sites recorded a COVID-19 bump in affiliate sales, and as the industry continues to evolve, the competition will only become stronger.
But here’s the kicker: The gaining popularity of affiliate marketing fueled by the pandemic wasn’t just a moment in time — it has changed consumer behavior for the long term.
According to Influencer Marketing Hub, data from Statista shows the projected expenditure for affiliate marketing in the United States could reach $8.2 billion in 2022, which is an increase from $7.4 billion in 2021. That’s up significantly from only $2.5 billion in 2012.
From Statista. Sourced from Influencer Marketing Hub.
As users become more used to seeing affiliate marketing links on the sites they frequent, it’s important to build an experience that’s intuitive and doesn’t disrupt your brand’s reputation. Not only will a good affiliate marketing experience benefit your users, it can help your SEOand increase your chances of securing recurring revenue. This is especially important as more e-commerce alternatives become popular, including on-platform shopping options like what’s available on Instagram and other social platforms.
Affiliate Marketing as a Subfolder
As a publisher, you’re already focused on creating content that engages your audience and moves the needle on the metrics that matter for your business. It’s almost unthinkable to add affiliate marketing to your task list, especially when it includes a technical overhaul that needs to work seamlessly with your retail partners to be effective.
If the CMS you’re currently using doesn’t support e-commerce functionalities, you don’t have to migrate your site to a new platform to start an affiliate marketing program. RebelMouse is an enterprise-grade CMS by trade, but we also offer our affiliate marketing capabilities as a subfolder on your current domain. This means that you can have a Wishlist-style section on your website without changing your entire tech stack.
Daily product roundups on indy100.
RebelMouse’s affiliate marketing program means you get to take full advantage of our robust editorial tools without converting your entire site to our platform. Our modern Entry Editor makes posting products to your pages easy with built-in SEO tools right out of the box.
Within our Entry Editor is what we call Assembler, an enhanced list builder that breaks down an article into parts of an article, or particles. For affiliate marketing purposes, these particles are the perfect way to create organized product data.
Intuitive and Powerful Product Editor
A look at how RebelMouse’s Assembler can easily organize product data for affiliate marketing.
RebelMouse’s editorial interface makes entering product information a simple plug-and-play process:
Custom fields make entering product data easy on RebelMouse.
From the interface displayed above, you can easily add in the details for product title, a link out to the purchase page, brand, price, etc. When using our e-commerce section on your site, you can add your product posts to it and have it styled as a standalone product for sale.
We also offer multiple variations of how a product is priced, from a single price, to a full price with discount (or other variants), to multiple versions of a product with their own prices or ranges.
Structured Data for E-Commerce Products to Win at SEO
As described by Google, structured data is a set of clues provided to its crawler about what defines your content. Using schema, or a vocabulary you share with Google about every page on your site, you can tell Google’s crawler about the contents of your content so that it can index it correctly for search.
RebelMouse makes sure that your product posts are correctly wrapped in structured data according to Google's strict guidelines. This is done entirely behind the scenes by our platform, and your editors and tech team don't need to lift a finger to make sure the structured data is correct. This ensures that your posts are seen correctly by Google as product posts, allowing you to gain a pretty impressive benefit from how we mark them up.
Reviews and ratings on product posts can also be populated with structured data, which can be a powerful way to provide more information to Google about your product pages. Check out how our structured data integration for reviews and ratings helped improve the rich results for RebelMouse-powered Premier Guitar.
Offering these kinds of search optimizations will set up your affiliate marketing program for success. We’ve seen our clients, that previously had product posts without the correct structured data in place, experience a 20% increase in traffic to their posts once structured data was set up.
Launch a Simple and Easy Affiliate Marketing Program with RebelMouse
RebelMouse is proud to offer our modern e-commerce technology without migrating your entire website to our platform.
RebelMouse’s intuitive editor makes it easy to create an asset library of products for affiliate marketing.
The acceleration of e-commerce in our post-pandemic world should entice publishers of all sizes to weigh the benefits of affiliate marketing. It's a sure bet to increase revenue diversification and, when done effectively, build loyalty with your user base.
Request a proposal today and let’s start building new revenue for your business. Click here to learn even more about affiliate marketing on RebelMouse.
