I want to tell you about a dirty little secret of the eCommerce world. It’s called Influencer or Affiliate Marketing. K, fine, it’s neither dirty nor a secret, but we’re in storytelling mode here…

Companies are raking it in using marketplaces like GrowSumo. The marketplace and software is setup to connect businesses with influencers to help promote their products. It’s actually insanely easy in principle…

You have products / software / services that a specific group of people should be interested (yo, if you don’t have a target market setup, we need to talk). Maybe it’s a woman’s shoe store. Maybe it’s a new online software tool perfect for Social Media Marketers. Whatever it is, it is very likely that there are folks in the world right now that have either direct or indirect influence over your target market.

What affiliate marketing let’s you do is to incentivize these influencers to promote your products / software / services with cold hard cash. For instance, let’s go back to the Woman’s Shoe eCommerce business… How many fashion bloggers, instagramers, pinterest boards can you name that own a small-medium sized audience? Let me tell you – there are thousands and thousands!

What if you could easily set up a program that would pay these influencers to promote your products? Think about it this way – what if for every 1000 followers this influencer had, you could get one sale? How valuable would a group of maybe 200-300 influencers be if they were producing these kinds of results??

Quick math >> 200 Influencers >> One Post / Month >> Average Following of 12,000.

That would be 2400 sales / month, strictly from Influencer Marketing. Obviously these are made up variables, and it’s not like you can snap your fingers and produce a network of 200 influencers overnight. But when you consider that each sale should produce an email address, and some percent of repeat business, the power of this exercise should be reasonable huge. In fact, entire businesses are predicated on Affiliate Marketing alone.

Alright, I hope you get how important this truly is. I wanted to dive into some tactics, so we went out and spoke with one of the Founders of GrowSumo about how to respectfully get the attention of influencers…

Quickly. Before we dive into that conversation. On GrowSumo. This is my favorite new affiliate marketing network. Other networks, like Share-A-Sale or Commissions Junction, are super difficult to get into. They require massive integrations within your store, and big upfront retainers so they can pay their affiliates. With GrowSumo, the ecommerce integration was super easy (took me less than a day, with their generous support on a few finer technical details) and they just bill you monthly for all of the affiliate commissions they need to pay out. It’s only $300 / month. It pays itself if you work for it…