Advertising is not the only way you can get sales for your business or online store. It’s by far the most popular way to drive traffic and sales, but influencer marketing and affiliate marketing are just as good.
In fact, for people on a low budget these can be better alternatives. And if you’re not getting the results you want from ads, it can be a nice backup strategy. However, most people get drawn in by the prospect of quick money from ads and neglect the other options.
In today’s post I want to talk about how you can recruit affiliates and give them a unique referral link to track sales and pay commissions.
So here’s how affiliate marketing works in a nutshell:
You recruit partners and provide them with a unique tracking link. They then promote your products with their unique link and whenever someone buys through their link, you pay them a small commission.
At the end of every month you pay them the due commissions. Affiliate marketing is so great because there’s no risk and no upfront investment. With Facebook ads you can lose money. But with affiliate marketing you can’t lose any money, since you only pay for sales.
I won’t go into detail explaining how affiliate marketing works, but I want to show you three ways you can use to track affiliate sales.
1) LeadDyno.com
This is the platform I use for most of my affiliates. It integrates nicely with Stripe and also Shopify, and it’s a robust and reliable system.
You can provide your affiliates with an affiliate dashboard where they can retrieve their unique tracking link and see how many visitors and sales they’ve referred and how many commissions they’ve earned.
Their plans start at $49 per month.
But if you recruit enough affiliates the platform easily starts paying for itself since you’ll get a lot of sales without upfront investment.
2) Referson.com
The second app I really like is Refersion. If you’re planning to track affiliate sales for your Shopify store, I recommend this platform. It works as a stand-alone tool but there’s also a Shopify plugin.
Refersion is a bit more sophisticated when it comes to their Shopify integration, so if you’re on Shopify, definitively give Refersion a shot.
3) Using coupon codes
A third option to track affiliate sales with Shopify is by creating a unique coupon code for every affiliate that you recruit. This way you don’t need any additional software and can track incoming sales.
Just provide each affiliate with a unique coupon code, and whenever a sale from that coupon code comes, you know it’s from that affiliate.
Then you can manually keep track of all the commissions and pay them out at the end of the month. The downside is that affiliates won’t have a dashboard where they can see their own traffic, sales and commissions. So it’s less transparent and they have to trust you.
Those are three easy ways to track affiliate sales.
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Justin Samra
Hey Till – loved this short but on point lesson. I use Shopify and in need of affiliate tracking. I was thinking of using the coupon code like you said, but was wondering if there was a way to have that detail flow down to my quickbooks so i can track and group sales that way for 1099’s and what not. Any thoughts on that or is it all manual?
J.