GUARANTEED TO INCREASE
YOUR PERFORMANCE MARKETING SALES

Have you heard of performance marketing? This is a new age form of marketing that looks at performance metrics such as sales and conversions instead of ‘vanity metrics’ such as page views, clicks and subscribers. The focus is shifted from getting people into your website to getting people that actually want to take action and buy.

In this article, you’ll learn the basics of performance marketing. You’ll learn what it is, why you should use it and how it works. Then, you’ll also learn about performance marketing softwares and how they can improve your business.

Performance marketing is called as such because it is a form of marketing where affiliates are paid when a specific action is completed. Hence, they are paid on performance. Unless an action is completed, no payment is made.

A. Definition of Terms

Before we can discuss performance marketing, you must first understand the different terms used by people engaged in it. These are the following:

Lead/s

A lead is any prospect that visits a website. Sometimes, leads are counted based on sign-up. So if a prospect signs up to a particular online form, he is counted as a lead. In pay-per-lead platforms, a commission is only generated when a prospect is converted into a lead.

CPC

CPC stands for Cost-Per-Click. This is where advertisers pay a publisher a fixed fee for each click that they will get out of the website. Prices can be as low as $0.01 per click. The price will depend on the demand and performance of the keyword. This is common in PPC or pay-per-click advertising platforms.

CPM

CPM stands for cost per 1000 impressions. In this model, the number of people that loads the website is counted instead of the click. This means that the fixed rate is only paid when the page is refreshed at least 1000 times. So if an advertiser pays $1 CPM. They will pay $1 when the website loads for 1000 times.

PPV

There is also another model called PPV or pay-per-view. This is more common in video platforms where a fixed rate is asked to allow the prospect to see the entire video.

Clicks

This is when a customer clicks on the designated link. The publisher is paid a fixed rate in CPC models when this action is done.

Sale

This is when an affiliate managed to turn a prospect into a buyer. He then earns a commissions based on his sale.

B. Performance Marketing Main Actors

There are several actors at play in performance marketing. It is important to understand these actors so that you may communicate with them effectively.

Publishers

Publishers are the main beneficiary of performance marketing. They get paid for every designated action. These people are also called as referrers, marketing partners or affiliates and they are in charge of promoting the business to other people.

Publishers can make money by completing the designated action. This can include driving traffic, getting people to sign up or selling products or services. They may employ a variety of strategies including paid advertising, email marketing, social media marketing and others. However, they have no participation in the fulfillment of goods or services. They only work as marketers.

Advertisers

Advertisers, on the other hand, are the merchants or the retailers. These are the people that have a product or service to sell but they lack the network or the skill to sell what they have. With this, they create a referral or affiliate marketing program to help them get more sales.

When they open their program, they can let publishers sign up as affiliates. Signing up as an affiliate can be automatic or upon approval. If it is upon approval, the publisher has to sign up as an affiliate and disclose his website. This is then subject to the approval of the advertiser.

Advertising Networks

Networks act as connectors to advertisers and publishers. They are an online community where they meet and transact with each other. Advertising networks can get a cut of the fee of each transaction and this is how they make money.

Advertising Agencies

Advertising agencies may also enter the scene when they choose to promote certain products or services. These agencies are more than just ordinary affiliates. They already have a system of promotion and conversion in place. With this, they no longer need to split test campaigns. They just need to plug certain products and watch them make sales for them.

OPMs (Outsourced Project Managers)

OPM stands for Outsourced Program Management. This is where a firm or agency launches or runs your performance marketing for you. This is a good solution for those who don't want to do their performance marketing by themselves nor do they want to learn it. With this, they just give them website to an agency and the agency will do all the marketing for them. The benefit of doing this is the instant access to the OPM's experience, expertise and networks. This takes the guesswork out of your marketing for OPMs already know what they are doing. If you're lucky, you may also get access to their services such as search engine optimization, compliance, landing page creation and optimization and others.

Solution Providers

You cannot market online without a website. However, not everyone can create one from scratch. A solution provider is the answer to this problem. They do this by creating websites, applications or tools that can help the advertiser or the publishers. Services may include hosting, analytics, legal services, application development and application optimization.

C. Who Should do Performance Marketing?

Performance marketing is pretty much open to everyone. Some people who can benefit the most out of performance marketing are bloggers, ecommerce website owners, online sellers and website developers. It provides a way to make even more money by enlisting other people to do the marketing for you. Plus, it can also give content marketers such as bloggers another stream of income.

Now that you know what performance marketing means, it is time to know its purpose. In this section, you’ll learn about the different benefits of performance marketing to different target markets as well as how to determine if you should use it for your business.

A. Benefits of Performance Marketing for Website Owners

One of the main beneficiaries of performance marketing are website owners. This can be bloggers or content publishers. Why is this beneficial for them? Well, performance marketing gives them the opportunity to make money from their existing content. By referring their audience to a certain product or service, they can instantly make some commissions and make some money.

With this, performance marketing grants the following benefits to website owners.

Gain Financial Freedom

The problem with a 9-to-5 job is that you don’t have the freedom to go where you wanted to go at any time of the day. Instead, you are fixed in your office and managed by your boss. However, if you are getting paid by advertisers every month, you can be your own boss. You just need to focus on constantly improving your content and traffic and you’ll be making money round the clock.

Allow You to Make Money from Your Passion

Gone are the days when making money have to be difficult. We live in a generation where anyone can make money out of their passion. With performance marketing, it is possible. With just a few ads in your content, you can focus more on creating that you love and helping other people while you make money on the side with your commissions.

Supplement Your Income

If becoming a full-time publisher is not that attractive to you, that’s okay. You can create content part-time and supplement your income with performance marketing. It doesn’t need to be your primary source of income.

Become a Business With Little Capital

Lastly, performance marketing gives you the opportunity to start a business with little to no capital. You just need a domain and a website with unique content. Then, you’ll need some traffic and turn them into a loyal audience. Then, you can start promoting right away.

Is Performance Marketing for You (Publisher)?

If you are convinced to become a publisher, there are some things that you should consider before you take the plunge. Performance marketing after all is not for everyone. Here are some skills that you should have if you want to become a performance marketer.

• Independent Worker - As I have told you earlier, performance marketing grants you freedom. But this doesn’t mean that you should do whatever you want. You need to at least have the discipline to keep on working even if there is no one watching you.
• Creative - Being a creative person is more than just being good in the arts or having the eye for beauty. It is also about knowing how to think outside of the box. It is about coming up with creative solution to problems.
• Have the Necessary Technical Knowledge - You cannot become a publisher if you don’t know what a domain is. If you don’t know how to install your own website and don’t know how to understand website coding, this is not for you.
• Have a Writing or Video Skill - Also, writing or video skills is an absolute necessity. You need to have a skill that will allow you to create content for your audience.

B. Benefits of Performance Marketing to Advertisers

Performance marketing provides advertisers a way to market their products and services without any effort on their side. They simply present their product or service and allow the publishers to choose to promote them. From here, they can approve the publishers manually or automatically and they only need to pay them when an action is fulfilled.

Aside from marketing automation, there are also other benefits to performance marketing. These are the following.

Your Revenue Doesn't Stop When You Stop Promoting Your Site

One of the drawbacks of not having a performance marketing system is that your website revenue is highly dependent on your promotion. So if you keep on promoting your website, you'll make money. This means that your income is more active than passive. With a performance marketing system, you can keep on making money even if you are not taking action for you have other people promoting your business for you.

You Can Track How Sales Are Made

Also, you'll like having a performance marketing system for every sale is recorded and tracked. This means that you can study who your customers are and how they are acquired. You can see the types of websites that respond more to your ads. From here, you can also place ads in high performing websites in your niche.

You Can Access Different Networks

Every publisher has their own network. This can be their readers, subscribers and followers. You will not have access to this unless they promote you. So performance marketing allows you to tap this and make money from it.

You Can Extend Your Brand's Reach

If your brand's reach is dependent only in your own promotion, it will reach that far. But if you have hundreds of affiliates promoting your brand, your reach will be greater. With more people, your reach compounds and more people will see and remember your brand.

Performance marketing is truly beneficial to advertisers. In fact, businesses are highly encouraged to have at least one performance marketing program in their website. It will help them in not only generating more sales but also increase their audience reach for the future.

Is Performance Marketing for You (Advertiser)?

While performance marketing is mostly automatic, it doesn’t mean that it is 100% hands-off. This means that you need some form of dedication to fulfill the required activities if you want this to produce desirable results. With this, you should look into your business to determine if you have the means and the time to use performance marketing in your business.

1. 1. How Old is Your Business?
   Performance marketing is not for new businesses. You need to be in business for at least 6 months if you want affiliates to find that your products or services are worth selling. You need to establish your brand first. This is necessary if you want to convince affiliates to sell your products and services for you.
   2. Do You Have a List of Customers?
   Performance marketing will work better if you have a ready list of customers. With this, you just need to message them and they’ll instantly know that you have an affiliate program in place. Having a list will make promotion easier for you. With this, you don’t need to go out of your way to contact customers. You can just send them an email.
   3. Are Your Customers Satisfied with Your Product and Services?
   Your products or services should be worth promoting if you want to convince others to do it for you. This means that you should have customers that are delighted with your service in the past. This can come in the form of testimonials or user reviews. If they’re positive, you’ll find it easier to convince affiliates to promote your website.
   4. What is Your Target Market?
   Some target markets are able to sell better than others. Some can sell better as referrers than affiliates. Take the beauty niche for example. Products are sold through referrals and reviews. You should consider your customers because they are the ones who will do the promotion for you.
   5. Have You Tried Other Forms of Advertising?
   Knowledge in advertising is valuable if you plan to do performance marketing in your website. You should be familiar with the terms introduced in this guide along with conversion rates, ROI and others. You need to know this so that you can get the most out of your performance marketing program.
   6. Have You Tried Paid Advertising?
   Some paid advertising is necessary if you want your program to gain some traction. After all, no one will know about your program unless you promote it. Aside from this, you should also get acquainted with the different methods of paid advertising as these will be the methods that will be used by your affiliates later on.
   7. Do You Have a Return and Delivery Policy?
   Return and delivery policies are essential if you want your affiliates to feel safe in promoting your product or service to other people. Since they will be promoting your brand for you, they want their referrals to feel safe in buying from you. You can only do that if you have a return and delivery policy.
   8. How Much Will You Need to Setup the Program?
   Next, you should determine how much you’ll need to fully set up your program. For this, you’ll usually need a page in your website or a subdomain. Then, you can install a performance marketing software so that you can instantly create landing pages and thank you pages.
   9. Who Will Setup the Program
   Then, you should determine who should set up the program. Why should you do this? You need to discern if you have enough skill and time to create a program like this. After all, it is not easy. It entails coding and having the necessary pages for your program. You can automate this if you have performance marketing software.
   10. Who Will Manage the Program
   You should also determine who should manage the program. Right off the bat, you should look at your activities and discern if you will have the time to track new affiliates, update your marketing messages and creatives as well as pay your affiliate commissions on a regular basis.
   11. Will You Need Additional Personnel for the Program to Work?
   If you find that your team can hardly manage the activities, it is time to decide if you should outsource the program to other people. This can be as simple as hiring someone to set up your affiliate marketing software or hiring a program manager.
   12. Will You Need Additional Technologies for the Program to Work?
   Also, you should consider the cost of the softwares, computers and other technologies that you’ll need to manage it. You need to factor this in your computation to determine if your business is ready for performance marketing.
   13. Do Your Competitors Have a Performance Marketing Program?
   Also, you should take a look at your competitors. If they are already doing performance marketing, you should do so as well. Unless you want to get left behind, you should also try your best to have your own performance marketing program.
   14. Have You Decided on the Reward?
   Performance marketing have different types of rewards. It can be cash, percentage discounts or actual products. You need to decide on the reward before you can launch your program.
   15. How Will You Pay your Affiliates?
   You need to know how you will pay your affiliates. With this, it is best to get acquainted with the different payment systems such as PayPal, Skrill and others. Aside from that, you should also look at the available payment methods in your software. Sometimes, this may limit you to certain payment methods.

Once you have the answer to these questions, only then can you proceed to creating your performance marketing program.

C. How Much Money Can You Make Out of Performance Marketing?

Performance marketing income depends mostly on the quality of leads and how they convert into a sale. But this can be tweaked for maximum returns because everything is tracked. This means that you can improve conversion optimization rates quickly with your preexisting data.

Performance marketing works by recruiting affiliates or having other people promote your product or service and rewarding them when prospects perform a particular action. This can be as simple as a click or as complex as buying a subscription. In any case, the reward is only released when the action is made. This is make is very beneficial to advertisers who only want to pay for results.

A. Performance Marketing Process

Performance marketing is done through a registration page. In this page, would-be affiliate apply to promote a particular product or service. They show the advertiser their website and explain why they are the best person to promote the product. From here, the advertiser approves the affiliate. Only then can the affiliate promote the product or service and get a commission from every sale.

B. What is Performance Marketing Software?

Performance marketing is automated through software. Performance marketing software have the functionalities to not only allow the registration and approval of affiliates. It also allows the release of unique tracking URLs and an analytics dashboard that tracks all incoming registrations and sales. With it, payout is also automated because the affiliate emails are listed and automatically computed. Payment can then be done in a single click instead of paying each affiliate one-by-one.

C. Why You Should Use Performance Marketing Software?

Setting up an affiliate program manually can be quite tedious. Not only will you have to deal with complicated coding, you also need to make sure that everything works perfectly. Plus, there are so many processes that you have to consider when setting this up. There’s affiliate registration, referrals and rewards. You also need to create dedicated affiliate dashboards along with having a registration page, thank you page and reward page. Without a software, this can take a lot of time.

D. Who should Use Performance Marketing Software

Performance marketing software is for any business owner who wants to have a program but don’t want to invest the time and effort to code it from the ground up. Instead, they will invest money in a proven system that they can instantly install in their domain. From here, they can run an affiliate or performance marketing program in just a few clicks.

E. How to Choose Your Performance Marketing Software

Now that you know the importance of a performance marketing software, you are probably wondering about what you need to look for in a software. There are a few things that you should consider.

• Proven Track Record - You need a software that can do more than what it claims. It should have a proven track record of helping businesses in the past. How can you know this? You’ll see it in the reviews. If a company has a constant stream of positive reviews, then it may be a software that is worth using.
• Affordability - You cannot use a software that you can’t afford. With this, you should stick with a performance marketing software with a price point that is attractive to your wallet. But price should not sacrifice features. It should still have the basic features that you need at an affordable price point.
• Reliable Customer Service - Softwares can be tricky to work with if you cannot get someone to help you. With this, reliable customer service is a must even for performance marketing softwares. You need the security that there is always someone ready to answer your questions in case you get lost.
• Unique Features - If you’re buying a performance marketing software that is just like the others, it may not be worth your money. With this, it is very important to look for some unique features as you decide to buy a particular performance marketing software.

F. How to Get Affiliates with Performance Marketing Software

Can performance marketing softwares help you get affiliates? It certainly does! Remember that these softwares are like all-in-one systems. It includes the registration page as well as provides a dedicated affiliate dashboard. With this, you will have a system that will not only allow you to capture potential affiliates but also register them and provide them with a unique affiliate tracking URL that they can use to promote your product or service. Once you have the system in place, you just need to promote your program in affiliate networks or existing customers. You can then set a reward for each referral or sale. Then, you can promote the program to attract other people to promote your products or services for you.

G. How To Promote Your Business Using Your Performance Marketing Software

No man is an island. What one can do will multiply tenfold if it is done by many. This is the power of performance marketing softwares. They enlist the power of an army of affiliates that can promote a brand’s product or service. With this, promotion is no longer dependent on your marketing personnel. Instead, it is done automatically through your affiliates.

Since you’ll have hundreds or even thousands of people mentioning your brand’s products and services all over the Internet at the same time, the result will be an immediate boost not only in your website’s search engine rankings but also in your overall traffic and sales.

BONUS: What Software Can I Recommend?

One of the best performance marketing softwares that I can recommend is OSI Affiliate. It is a software that is designed for rewarding not just affiliates but customers who recommend your products to their family and friends. What makes this different is their automatic registration system. This automatically enlists customers as affiliates. With this, you no longer need to convince them to sign up to promote your site. You can just show them the rewards and convince them to refer more people to your website.

Also, it is considered as one of the best performance marketing softwares because of their awesome customer service team. This by itself is the sole reason why people buy from them. They are always ready to assist in any problem that you may encounter in using their software.

It is Time to Launch Your First Performance Marketing Campaign

So have you decided that you will have a performance marketing program in your business? Are you convinced that you need a software to run this? You don’t need to launch your program from scratch. You can use proven models and templates from a performance marketing software.

What software should you choose? Hopefully, it is a brand that you trust. If you don’t know a brand, you can always look at the reviews.