Cam Secore — January 4, 2017 Follow @camsecoreAffiliate marketing has been around for ages, but it took a completely different turn when it went online. Instead of just being through merchants and crafty salespeople, affiliate marketing has turned into a money-making strategy that anyone can participate in with just a little setup and advice. One of the newer incarnations of this marketing strategy involves the cash back tactic, popularized by Ebates. Incentives are a slippery slope, but getting good partners and traffic can set you up for life. Let’s get into what this strategy involves and how you can start using it towards your advantage.
What is It?
An “incentive” in the marketing lexicon refers to something special the clicker gets for clicking your link and completing the assigned action for you to get a commission (usually buying a product, but it can also be filling out a survey, adding information to a form or watching a short video clip).
As stated before, cash is a big incentive that gets anyone happy to click a link. Who wouldn’t want to save money and then get cash back for buying an item they were planning to get anyway? It’s a win-win, but cash isn’t the only incentive (and for good reason, as we will explain later).
A similar strategy involves charity. You will still save money, but the cash you would get back is instead given to a charity in your name (most also allow you to choose the foundation).
Many gaming apps offer incentives in the form of special items or extra lives. You’ve seen the “watch a short video clip and get (blah)!” ads posted on games before, everyone has. Whenever you watch that short video, the game creator gets paid, and the only reason you watched that clip was because you got something in return.
Others may offer free products (typically digital products, but sometimes physical) while others might give you access to something interesting, such as an elite website which you would normally have to pay for.
In short, this is all about giving your traffic even more of a reason to click that link and make you money.
Obstacles
Before you run off to find affiliate links and throw money at people for making you a commission, there are a few big obstacles that you have to consider. First and foremost is that many affiliate companies actually ban or restrict incentives (it voids Amazon Assoicate’s opeerating agreeement). You will see this in the fine print, and breaking their rules can lead you to big trouble. At best, you can’t do business with them anymore. At worst, you may have to pay penalties for breaking the rules, so read the terms of each affiliate very carefully before trying this.
The next big hurdle is that this strategy will make much less money per click than your average affiliate strategy because you will be effectively paying your readers to get you a commission. Instead of getting 10% of the sale, you might only end up with 5% or less (depending on how much you pay back). You will need a lot of traffic to make this work.
Lastly, there’s tracking and taxation. You will need a sophisticated program and system in place for tracking clicks, ensuring that people are given the proper type and amount of incentives and that you report your profit, loss and payments accurately when tax season rolls around.
However, if you can get everything right, this can make you some monster money, and you don’t need to worry about making your people happy because everyone wants something free in return for clicking a link.
Ethics
Is it right to offer people something extra just to buy a product? That’s the backbone of the ethics argument when it comes to incentive-based strategies. On the plus side, it works very well. People want more. They want to feel acknowledged when they make a purchase and they want to get as much as possible whenever they spend their hard-earned money.
However, many on the other end wonder how long this can possibly work. At first, people would buy items because that’s all that was available and they needed the item. Then, people were offered discounts in order to make buying from a certain store more attractive and affordable. Now, businesses are starting to be forced to give customers more just to survive. What will customers require next? This can potentially create a race to the bottom where only a few people profit, but other businesses collapse under the financial pressure.
At the same time, while that is the potential fallout from this becoming rampant, at this point it’s only a small percentage of consumers that regularly buy through incentivized channels. Most are still looking for discounts and that’s it, so it’s unlikely that this collapse will come about (at least anytime soon).
Conclusion
As long as you can find affiliates that don’t mind incentivized customers, this model is actually very easy to implement. While you have several obstacles to overcome, the main strength of this strategy is that people love saving money and then getting a bonus on top of it, so it’s easy to build a dedicated audience as long as you keep expanding your selection.
Just be mindful of who you work with and ensure that you’re properly tracking everything so that your business goes smoothly. If you can get all that down, then this can make you a very rich person with minimal effort.
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