AFFILIATE MARKETING – Why and How to Start It?
I’ll start this article with a question: Are you be willing to share part of revenue from sales that you would not get otherwise? For most cases, the answer would be YES. There are many methods to market your business online: e.g. pay-per-click campaigns such as Google’s Adword, CPM (= cost per thousand impressions) of your banner on high-traffic sites, ads in newsletters etc. etc. What is common for these marketing methods? You never PAY FOR RESULTS that campaign actually generated. Idea of affiliate marketing is to PAY ONLY FOR RESULTS. Don’t spend money on ineffective advertising; build your own advertising channels instead. Build partnerships – and partners will work for you. That’s why people refer to affiliate marketing as “cost-effective”, “performance-oriented” or “risk-free”. What kind of business can I market with affiliate program? Well, hard to find one that you can not. It doesn’t matter if you sell hardware, mortgages, site membership or a service. You can even pay for traffic: pay per click or pay per CPM Structure of affiliate program There are 2 basic kinds of rewards: flat fee (=fixed amount) or percentage commission. Your commissions to affiliates can be based on: Pay per sale - most common, you pay commission (flat or percentage) for sales referred by your affiliates Pay per lead - suitable for e.g. membership sites or sites offering paid content: similar to “per sale” model, but you pay for new member subscription. Pay per CPM - you can pay even for thousand impressions of your banner Pay per click – if you want to reward each click referred: if you are considering this kind of affiliate program, make a careful research about fraud protection features of solution you choose – otherwise it can cost you a lot of money.. A lot of programs are 2-tiered (2 levels of affiliates) – it means affiliates – parent affiliates can have subaffiliates – and parent affiliate get commission for their subaffiliate’s sales. Subaffiliates are those, who have been invited to your AP by parent affiliate. 2-tiered structure has its advantages: it motivates affiliates to recruit subaffiliates to your AP and maybe even train and communicate with them – which saves your time and generates your revenue. How to start affiliate program? There are 3 main possibilities: Stand alone software Hosted software Affiliate network Stand alone solution – requires software that is installed on your website (called also “affiliate tracking software/script”). Affiliate program is under your total control and responsibility. Hosted solution – is similar to stand-alone solution, but the software is hosted on 3rd party server – usually offered as service (=monthly payments). Affiliate network – software is again installed on 3rd party server, in addition to the affiliate tracking you gain immediate access to a network of potential affiliates. Which solution should I choose? As regards price: Stand-alone: one time fee for the software Hosted: monthly fee, sometimes even progressive charging according to the growth of your affiliate program Networks: will charge you a transaction fee on each affiliate sale or the will ask you to make minimum monthly payment or combination of those two. Also some fee to join might be included. Technical skills: Stand-alone: requires basic skills to install the software (usually installation wizard is available) and to integrate with other systems on your website (such as shopping carts/payment gateways/website itself). Hosted: almost no skills required Networks: almost no skills required Benefits of stand-alone solution. Since Amazon started its affiliate program, affiliate marketing grew rapidly. Due to its cost effectiveness and undisputed advantages, this field became very competitive. And competition is always good for customers: prices go down. There is a lot of software sold on the internet today – and not always the highest price means the highest quality! Do not fall for success stories and don’t spend hundreds of dollars for products that are just well marketed: you are probably not “the lucky guy”. Affiliate marketing is competitive – if you are new to this field you will surely not find the best way to market your business at once. This is MAJOR benefit of stand alone solution: while hosted or network solution offer you few possibilities to change your program, with stand-alone solution you have total control over your program. You can find the best way to market your products. Try and choose the best for you. ALWAYS want software with a lot of features. You might use a few of them at the beginning, but after several months you will certainly use more and more – would you like to pay for them? Or even pay for switching to another solution with extensive features? NO! We already mentioned the PRICE advantage of stand-alone solution: you pay one time fee – no need to discuss this any more – if you pay monthly, consequently you pay more than even for the most expensive stand-alone software on the net. It is worth to mention that solid software is sold for $150 or even less. Another benefit is positive effect of affiliate links on your search engine ranking: because the software is installed on YOUR domain, they can help you to improve ranking of YOUR website – not domain of hosted solution. Also stand alone solutions can be usually better branded for your business and customized for your specific needs. Cons of stand-alone solution Everything has its pros and cons. I’ll explain possible cons of stand-alone solution and what it takes to overcome them. If you feel that you’ll not be able to cope with what follows DO NOT choose stand-alone solution. 1. Technical skills – will help you during installation and integration of the software with your shopping cart / payment gateway / website. Usually, very little technical skill is required, which depends also on the level of support provided by vendor and how sophisticated the software is. Generally, if you’ll be able copy/paste some code snippets to certain places on your website or to a template page of your shopping cart, your skills are sufficient… 2. Affiliate recruitment – this is strong selling point of affiliate networks – your program gets immediate exposure to a network of affiliates, while for stand-alone software you’ll need to recruit affiliates yourself. The fact is that you must motivate affiliates of the network as well – if you don’t, they’ll stop promoting your products. Registering your affiliate program to numerous affiliate directories (for free) and setting up appropriate multi-tier structure helps you to recruit affiliates to your program. But it takes time and efforts… 3. Security – with hosted solution you do not need to back-up your database, upgrades are applied by team of people in charge of maintenance. If your solution doesn’t have feature to back-up your database / history this can be serious problem if some hacker attack occurs or something just “goes wrong”. Martin Melisek is with Qualityunit, vendor of affiliate sotware Post Affiliate Pro - award winning affiliate software that recently introduced state-of-art flash tracking technology http://www.qualityunit.com/affiliate/software.html Identify ineffective campaigns and partnerships with high reliability tracking. |
Other Articles
Affiliate Terms Affiliate Business – The business of linking web sites with special niches or content (affiliate sites) with advertisers or publishers who wish to sell goods or services to this specialized group. The affiliates gain by collecting additional income from their site, and the merchants gain by having a cost-effective way to add new customers. Aff ...Super Affiliate Strategies Part 3 In our previous Super Affiliate Strategies articles, we went over ways to increase your web site's click through ratio. Today we are going to take an entirely different approach, this time we are going to be promoting affiliate programs outside of your web site.I realize that there are a lot of affiliates that don't have their own web sit ...In Mourning for the Google Cash System Do you remember when you could pick an affiliate program, hustle up a few hundred keywords toss it all into your Adwords account & wait for the commissions. No me neither! I was busy doing something else during those glory days.If it ever was that easy it certainly isn't any more, there's a lot of competition & intense bidding for keyword ...Web Affiliate Programs - Experiences from the Frontline After two years of relying on Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, organic search engine results, web directories and word of mouth, I finally decided to give web affiliate programs a try.From my research, I knew that there are a lot of affiliate marketers (as affili ...Affiliate Marketing: Set Yourself Apart From The Crowd! Affiliate marketing makes it easy for anyone to have a product or service to market. In most cases, all you have to do is fill out a form and in return you will be given your very own unique affiliate link that you can begin promoting!Thousands of people are making money on the web through affiliate marketing. But this causes a dilemma. H ...Affiliate Program Basics Affiliate Program is a ground floor opportunity. All you have to do is send visitors to your affiliate web site by placing a textlink or banner on your website and receive a commission on each sale, without the complication and expense of selling anything yourself.Instead, you earn a commission for producing a transaction. Affiliate progr ...What Puts The "Super" In Super Affiliate? To be super at anything means to excel beyond the scope of average or achieve superiority status.Super affiliates do just that. They are ordinary people achieving superior status in what they love. They devote their time, talents and resources to making their dreams a reality.Let's take a look at ten strategies that have helped ord ...Affiliate Tracking Software: How It Works and How To Get It If you're considering implementing an affiliate program through your business' web site, you'll need an effective way to track leads and sales generated by your affiliates. While writing a program is definitely an option for some, it's not an option for those that are not quite as PHP savvy. In this instance, it becomes necessary to consider an ...How I Failed With Affiliate Programs A few years ago I married an Italian woman and left my Caribbean island, I came to Italy to live among pizza, spaghetti and fashion, and to work as a waiter.One day surfing the Internet, I discovered that many people were making thousands and millions of dollars from the net, then I began to investigate how to do it, in order to make mone ...Things you should know about Affiliate Marketing 1. How to build a good site that converts2. SEO - you need TONS of traffic since only maybe 1 out of 200 will buy and your commission per sale may only be around $10. SEO help your site get top ranking in the search engines so more people can find you. There may be over 1 million pages competing for a search term relating to a product you ...Big Ticket Items - 6 More BIG Benefits To Selling As An Affiliate Today, we’re going to cover 6 More BIG Benefits to selling Big Ticket items as an AFFILIATE. First, we had better define both Big Ticket Item and Affiliate. A Big Ticket Item is any product or service that sells for more than $500 or $1000. An Affiliate is someone who sells other people’s products. ...Using Content Management Systems For Affiliate Marketing The technical hassles of creating a website have always been a problem for many affiliate marketers. Whether it's HTML, FTP, CSS, PHP, or any other confusing acronym, some affiliate marketers feel that it's a constant battle.Coming from a technology background, I was fortunate in that I didn't have to worry about that. But that doesn't me ...5 Steps To Affiliate Gold What is debatable though is the validity of the over used dynamic phrase “make $1,000s a day without a product and without a website“. That may have been the case yesterday but today the market and the search engines are much more demanding. Look on your affiliate programs as your Internet apprenticeship.Here are 5 suggested steps to inc ...The 3 Ingredients of Affiliate Marketing Success What does it take to become a successful Affiliate Marketer?What are the ingredients of an affiliate marketing success story?All these questions challenge the affiliate marketers who want to make it big time.Although affiliate marketing is touted as one of the easiest and most effective ways to earn money online, it's not as ...Ten Steps to Boost Your Affiliate Commissions Today Interested in boosting your affiliate commissions? There isn't one "magical" secret to increase your affiliate commissions, but here are some simple steps you can take to make more money through affiliate programs right now.1. Capture e-mail addresses with an "opt-in" list before sending your visitor to the merchant vendor web site. ...Poker Affiliate Marketing Strategy: Reciprocal Link Exchanges Link exchanges are an excellent tool that you can use as an online poker affiliate to promote your website, blog, or newsletter. It is a strategy that takes some time to properly implement, but the results will continue paying you for years to come.There are many ways that you can find link partners. Forums, search engines, and link excha ...Affiliate Program Marketing: Become an Online Marketing Success Advertising and marketing has become one of the largest and most profitable careers around. Successful advertising gurus can command huge wages by working in the creative industry. Few people would choose to argue with earning money by the bucketful doing something as simple and enjoyable as creating advertising campaigns.The invention of ...
|