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Marketing is a growing and evolving sector that has had its own share of overhauling due to the rise of technology. But would you believe it if I said that affiliate marketing has been there for a long time? Well, what is affiliate marketing?
Say you want to sell a car, and you say that if I can get you a buyer, then you will pay me 10% of the profits. So I put up ads and stick bills on walls and get a buyer for you. In this case, I am putting my efforts into getting a customer for a product that I do not own, nor do I have any connection with. This is how affiliate marketing used to happen in the past. People would get rewarded by sellers for spending their time and efforts in getting buyers for products.
However, with the advent of technology, the scheme of things has changed a bit. These days, you can share links of products hosted on e-commerce websites, be it in your blog, your post, your social media feed, or any other electronic medium. If someone buys the item by going through your link, you will be getting some points, which you can redeem for money in the long run.
Many people write about products that are sold by big players like Amazon, and when they do, they insert a link for the product as well. So when someone is going through such an article and happens to click on the link and actually buy the item, the affiliate marketer gets paid.
Why is Affiliate Marketing a Lucrative Revenue Source?
With the advent of the new age, people are more and more focusing on solving specific problems. A technology company tries more to evolve their product while allowing smaller partners to look over marketing and operations. In such a scenario, affiliate marketing works well since you pay only if your marketing partner can actually show results by generating sales volumes for you. It also takes out the headache of building, managing and paying a team of people whom you will have to take care of irrespective of whether or not they can provide results.
How Web Scraping can boost your Affiliate Marketing business?
You would already know the topmost e-commerce companies in your country. But do you know the names of the top e-commerce companies in different sectors such as industrial goods, FMCG, Consumer Durables or others in your country?
Making a list of these manually would be pretty difficult, and there would be high chances of bias in case you go about asking people about this. So it is better that you crawl the web and create a list based on search volume and mentions. Such a list would help you kick-start your journey as an affiliate marketer and also help you save tremendous amounts of time that would have otherwise gone into manual research.
Once you find the best-paying companies out there with the help of scraping, you can sign up as an affiliate with them.
1. Build scrapers for each partner website
Scraping partner websites will help you get the product links when a user searches for something on your website, you can give them links for all related products using this scraper.
You can build a custom system that will fetch data pertaining to the keywords entered by your users in your search bar, in the different websites that you are associated with. This might not be a simple task and would be better if you get a team of experienced web scrapers or a web scraping service such as PromptCloud to build the scraper for you.
2. Identify popular products in the affiliate marketing ecosystem by scraping other affiliate marketing websites
What is the best way to get data on the internet? By scraping the web of course! Well, if you want to know which products are most suitable for affiliate marketing and result in high sales and proportionally high commission, just crawl data from other affiliate marketing websites or blog-sites that you regard as your competition.
3. Scrape data regarding the availability of the product
A person comes to your website, finds a product, clicks on the link, and gets directed to a page that says “Product out of stock. Here are some similar products for you.” He leaves. And thus you lose out on an opportunity and high are the chances that the customer would never visit your website again.
Things like these are dynamic since a product might go out of stock at any moment. So it is better if you crawl data regarding stock availability in the background and disable links of all the products that are currently out of stock. Scrape product data so that you do not show links of products that are currently out of stock, which would in turn reduce your conversion rates.
4. Identify top-selling products on websites
You are a blog-site, and it would be impossible for you to write about and share links of millions of products that are available on your partner company’s website. Well, just crawl their website to get the most popular and highly-rated items from each category and subcategory and write about them, and provide their links to your customers.
Affiliate marketing looks simple from the surface but it really isn’t, that is unless you do it methodically and scientifically. Once you build a name for yourself and you get a faithful customer base, affiliate marketing can help generate profits for you over time, without spending too much money. Automating it with the use of web scrapers can significantly lower your operational costs and you can very well work even with a small team, thus increasing your profits exponentially.
