Affiliate marketing

‘An affiliate marketing program is where a manufacturing company enters an agreement with third parties who’ll promote your product on your behalf, and send traffic to your web site. In return, you’ll pay some sort of bounty when a visitor they’ve delivered completes a certain task on your web site. Referrals are usually made to your site through the use of a button or a special kind of link on an affiliate’s site [page 114, 1].’

Two of the best examples of affiliate marketing schemes that helped build commerce-based web sites into billion-dollar businesses are those run by eBay and Amazon.

There are two sides to affiliate marketing: the merchant or vendor, who has a product or service for sale, and the publisher who generates leads to them. This chapter will be focused on managing an affiliate program as a merchant.

The main benefits of running an affiliate marketing campaign are: receiving fixed Return on Investment (ROI), and getting an extended reach to customers. First means that in most affiliate programs, a company either makes payments after a sale, or payments are made up front, however price per unit is always fixed. Secondly, affiliate programs enable to expose products or services to new prospects beyond company’s usual reach. It is also possible to leverage the brand strength of affiliates to help improve own image.

To run an affiliate campaign, a company should start by conducting a web search on its industry, and create a list of the higher ranking sites. After that it investigates each one’s suitability for affiliate program and starts contacting them one by one. There must be a fit between an affiliate’s audience and products or services of the company.

One of the common traps for new affiliate marketing programs is that they’re set up, a few affiliates sign on, some revenue comes in the door, and then it’s left to go on itself with minimal communication to the affiliates. The advertising company must keep affiliates up to date about the latest products and services they are offering. A good way to keep affiliates informed and up to date is through a monthly affiliate newsletter. This gives them a single reference point to keep on top of what is happening the program.

In any case, affiliate marketing is worthwhile to consider as if a company can develop a large affiliate base that sends plenty of quality traffic to its site, that is one less task to concentrate on, allowing to focus instead on converting those leads into sales.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13