Affiliate Dropshipping Hack 2019

If you prefer listening here is a video for you

In this article, I will affiliate dropshipping hack in 2019. What I mean by this is how to use affiliate marketing to get sales on your dropshipping store. Honestly, I am very surprised how very few people are talking about having an affiliate program for dropshipping business, because I think this is one of the best tools you can use to make money with dropshipping. Weather you are doing Shopify dropshipping or Woocommerce dropshipping, it does not matter.

1. What Is An Affiliate Program For Dropshipping

First of all, in case if you have no idea what affiliate program is, in general, let me explain it really quick.

An affiliate program is when you recruit people to drive traffic to your business and you pay them a commission for every sale that was made by the people they brought.

You usually use a software that allows people to sign up for your affiliate program and gives them trackable links.

Using an affiliate software makes it very easy because it tracks the conversions by an affiliate and can even do automatic payouts.

The affiliates then can drive traffic to your dropshipping store in whatever ways they wish to do it unless you set some restrictions.

Related: ‘Why 95% Dropshipping Stores Fail‘

2. Why Affiliate Marketing For Dropshipping Is So Great

If you look at some of the biggest brands out there, I guarantee pretty much every single one of them has an affiliate program.

It might seem like it is something that only big companies can afford, but actually, I will show later how you can do it with very little resources as well.

I know some dropshipping stores that actually have the majority of their sales just through their affiliate program!

First of all, as I mentioned affiliate program requires very little effort these days if you use one of the existing software.

You just create an account, have affiliates to sign up, they drive sales to you and they get paid automatically.

So, literally, if you choose you could just create an affiliate page on your website and that is all the work that you need to do for the years to come.

Of course, you might want to put in a bit more work getting people into your affiliate program, but that is down to your strategy.

Just think about how much effort you put in into creating ads, testing them, running them and constantly making changes. It can be quite a bit of effort.

Another create thing about using affiliate program for dropshipping is the low costs for conversions.

This depends on every single person, but usually, for physical products stores give out 10% to 20% commission.

Actually, most of the time is on the lower end. So, if you are doing only 10% you can still find a lot of people who would be interested.

Just compare how much money you pay on ads per sale and how much you would pay for affiliate commission!

Having long time lasting ads that only cost you 10% of the product price to get a sale is rather difficult…

The affiliate softwares do cost some money, however, in comparison your return on investment is still amazing.

3. What Is The Best Affiliate Software For Dropshipping

Affiliate softwares do cost some money and I do know that when starting out a lot of people are pretty low on money, so that is why I will suggest two options.

I have gone through almost every affiliate software, and these are definitely the best ones out there now, especially what you get for your money.

There are some more advanced options that are better, but they all start at a minimum $300+ and I assume most of the people reading are not interested in that.

First is Refersion, is the very cheap way to start an affiliate program for a dropshipping store.

The starter plan with Refersion is only $19/month for up to 30 affiliate orders. And with this link, you can also get 14-day free trial!

That is really the cheapest you can get as all the other affiliate programs start at a minimum of $50 + percentage of your sales.

Even if you have only $10 profit margin, you only need 2 sales from your affiliates for it to pay off.

Even though Refersion has a very cheap starter package it does have all the necessary features for you to run an affiliate program.

Another option is Tapfiliate, which I would say is a better option as it has more features, better user inferface and is actually cheaper than more advanced Refersion plan.

Tapfiliate smallest plan starts at $69/month, however, that gives you 200 000 clicks and 7500 conversions.

You can get a Free 14-day trial with this link. 

Refersion profesional plan starts at $89/month and give you 130 orders.

Even if you have a horrible 0.01% conversion rate, Tapfiliate is still going to be the cheaper option and also the better option.

You might want to start with Refersion first and then switch to Tapfiliate, but keep in mind you will need to transfer all of your existing affiliates as well…

I know for some people $69/month will seem pretty steep, but as I said even if you get only $10 profit per oder, you only need 7 orders from your affiliates.

And most likely these are the orders you would have not gotten other way.

So, prepare affiliate program launch and try it out!

Related: ‘How To Deal With Long Shipping Times When Dropshipping With Aliexpress‘

4. How To Get Affiliates For Dropshipping Store

As I mentioned before you can really not put any effort into this and just create a page on your store where affiliates can sign up.

Make sure to explain all the rules and what they can expect and have a link at the bottom of your website or even at the top.

As people will come on your website some of them will notice it and they will sign up to become an affiliate.

Besides that, if you want to push it a bit more you can include it in your email marketing sequences.

People who have already purchased from you and love your products are a lot more likely to promote them.

Email marketing sequences are just set up once and that is it, so it is another easy way to recruit affiliates without really any effort.

Besides that, of course, you can promote it via your social media accounts, just have it in your bio or include it in your posts.

The best way how you can recruit a lot of affiliates to promote your dropshipping store is contacting people who do this for a living.

It might be social media influencers in your niche, bloggers or just related websites that you think could include your products in their content.

This does require some work, but it can result in a lot of sales and it is a fairly simple task, so you can always outsource it to a virtual assistant.

Related: ‘Biggest Dropshipping Mistakes‘

5. Why You Need Affiliate Program For Your Dropshipping Business

I have done and still am doing affiliate marketing myself and I have also very successfully used affiliate programs for my dropshipping business.

• Very Cost Effective

I cannot emphasize it more and this alone should be enough for you to try out an affiliate program.

You can set your commissions as low as 10% of the product price, and differently, from ads, these costs will never change.

• Simple To Do

A beautiful thing about an affiliate program is that it is very simple to use and you do not need to spend hours and hours that you would with other marketing methods.

You can figure out how to use affiliate software in a few minutes, which is much faster than spending hours trying to learn how to run ads.

• There Are No Risks

I do not think I have ever encountered anyone who managed to have profitable ads from the very beginning.

Running ads requires testing, and testing can cost a lot of money for no sales… 

If you get no sales from affiliates, you will not need to pay them.

• One Time Set Up

Again, differently from running ads or publishing content, creating an affiliate program and a page for your affiliates is a just one-time thing.

Once you set it up you will keep on getting new affiliates for as long as you have your dropshipping store.

• Grows Domain/Social Media

This is a bit more interesting point and you might have not even thought about it.

What affiliates do most of the time is they create some sort of content on their blogs or social media.

If they have links on their blogs re-directing to your store or sending people to your social media accounts, you become more of an authority.

It is called backlinking and Google increases your domain authority and ranks you higher in search results.

A similar thing happens for your social media.

Related: ‘100k Instagram Followers Autopilot Hack‘

Conclusion

I would say an affiliate program is basically sales people for your dropshipping store that you only pay if they bring you paying customers.

You do need to pay for an affiliate software, and it might seem like a lot, but if you push it and required enough affiliates it will definitely pay off.

I would say compared to other methods this has very little risk level, so try it out!

If you liked this then make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel, or maybe even sign up for my email newsletter to get the best dropshipping tips.