April 3rd, 2008
Affiliate marketing is advertising for someone else in exchange for a cut of the sales you generate. You’re sharing your traffic for a price. It’s a great way to capitalize on the traffic your website’s already producing.
So let us find out what people mean when they say “Affiliate marketing.”
It is high time Wikipedia entered the game:
“Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.”
Being an Affiliate
What does it require being an Affiliate?
If you possess a small home-based Internet business you can become an affiliate partner of other merchants and get money for sharing your traffic with other online sellers. You need to find a site that deals in the goods which are complementary to yours without overlapping
Before you join this or that affiliate program there are things you should consider:
- Find out if the site has an affiliate earnings history
- Get to know if they have an affiliate manager you can contact in case you have problems
- Is the affiliate marketing program of the site well-established?
You role in any Affiliate Marketing program is to make your clients to want to buy the products from your partner’s site. Simply placing a link to this site is obviously not enough. You have to promote and advertise the products by proving that they are somehow better than those of the competitors.
Jonathan Miller, Team-Affiliate.com, says:
“The sites that do better are the ones that select one or two offers, tell people why they recommend these particular offers, and then provide them with a link.”
Making use of affiliate partners
You yourself can use affiliates to increase your traffic. But you should be very choosy about whom to trust in the issue. Keep in mind that you are attaching your brand to their businesses. You have to find the sellers the collaboration with whom will make you benefit. Moreover, you affiliates must be relevant to your target market in order to get the right kind of traffic.
There are software programs that track visitors when they leave an affiliate’s website and click through to the merchant’s site. If they convert to a sale, the affiliate that referred them gets paid a commission. You can track your visitors in two different ways, and each has its own advantages:
There are apps that help Affiliate marketing partners track the traffic. This software tracks a user that clicks on a link at an affiliate’s site. If the user buys something from the final site, the affiliate get a commission. This monitoring can be done in two different ways:
- You buy a stand alone tracking app and integrate it into your web-page. In this case you yourself establish the commission.
- You can join an affiliate network (for instance, LinkShare or Kolimbo). The network establishes the commission but it also gives you access to their pool of affiliates.