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One great benefit of having an affiliate program is that your affiliates can become a defensive blockade for your brand.
What is a defensive blockade using affiliates?
Defensive blockades with affiliates are when they are used to block your competitors or negative detractors from the first page of search results in both organic and paid search listings.
Imagine typing your company’s name or flagship product’s name into Google.
As you start to review the paid search listings, you notice that some competitors are bidding on your brand name and trying to siphon off potential customers who are specifically looking for your product.
Now imagine doing this again and this time instead of seeing your competitors, you only see “friendly’s” promoting your product who are ultimately driving sales to your site.
This is possible through affiliate marketing.
Why use affiliates for a defensive bloackade?
Some question whether or not those would be sales you would’ve have gotten anyway. One some level that may be true. However, would you rather have the page full of affiliates whom only are paid when a sale occurs or would you rather have your competitors there diverting your traffic and sales?
Another thought, if they are able to close the sale with a different approach and can close the sale when you couldn’t, you still win in the long run because you were able to make a customer through their efforts. Either way you make money.
Why not let the affiliates duke it out with the trademark poachers on their dime?
If you’re wondering how much that costs, you might be suprised to hear that affiliates are paid on a pay for performance basis and are only paid when they make a sale.
This is all tracked using affiliate tracking technology where a pixel is fired from your thank you page whenever a sale occurs and is recorded in a third party affiliate tracking software or affiliate network.
Creating a defensive blockage creates a situation where both you and your affiliates win while your competitors get pushed to page two or further with their tail between their legs.
Further, some companies face a rather unique situation where a disgruntled past customer has made it their lifes mission to tarnish their brand and do an online smeer campaign and get ranked in the top 5 in the search results for their company’s name.
By providing a bounty in addition to commissions, you can attract some pretty big affiliates who would be more than happy to take the challenge.
Using affiliates as a defensive blockade can help you dominate the search results. It’s not enough to just turn affiltiaes loose on organic listings, you should also consider letting them go after paid search with your trademarks in a controlled manner.
To learn more about Net Media Group’s proven outsourced affiliate program management give us a call at (801) 365-0057 today!
