International Merchants Appealing to North American Audience

Affiliate Marketing is fairly established in the UK and Japan, and growing across Europe. Australia also has a growing affiliate marketing community. There’s tremendous affiliate activity in the Gaming/Gambling sector outside of the United States. In my last post, I wrote about how domestic merchants can leverage their affiliate program to reach an international audience. This week, I’d like to propose that the reverse is also true. Affiliate Marketing allows for a great opportunity for international merchants to reach a customer base in the United States.

Perhaps you’re a t-shirt / clothing / club ware merchant in Ibiza, Spain, or a silk / textile in Southeast Asia, or a crafts / woodwork merchant in Brazil. You’ve been doing quite well for yourself in local trade, and you’ve even sold some of your products through Ebay, and now you have your own website. You still have your business to run, so you don’t want to invest effort and time into the deep dive on pay per click bid management, SEO and link building principles, social media marketing in English. North Americans love your products, evidence coming from the few that have found your site to order, and also from your Ebay customers. You know you could be a great success if only more people knew about your business.

Affiliate Marketing provides an excellent cost-effective answer for international merchants wanting to expand their North American customer base. Perhaps you’re not comfortable enough to write ads and promote your online site in English. Grow your affiliate program with affiliates, and let them go out and promote the store. Work with your affiliates to produce a strong message and story to potential customers for your products and services, then allow those affiliates to carry your story to their visitors.

Your affiliates will be promoting you through many different channels. Allow for paid search, and let your affiliates write ads for Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and other search services. Let them blog about your site and products and produce a strong message in English promoting your store. Provide a data feed to give to comparison and shopping affiliates and propagate your product names all through various natural search results. Get huge exposure to the significant customer base that loyalty base affiliates have, after all they may never have had a chance to hear about your offerings otherwise.

There’s significant opportunity to tap a huge North American audience that loves to shop online. In many countries, online shopping is still in the infant stage as trust issues still must be overcome. However, in North American, online shopping is as accepted as drinking Coke. Get a website up, set-up an online shopping cart and credit card payment processor, and start thinking about kicking off an affiliate program to get exposure to that North American audience. Luckily, you don’t have to do it alone. There are plenty of outsourced affiliate program managers that are both cost-effective and measurable as far as results that can help you build and grow your program.