You’ve probably heard of affiliate marketing before, although maybe not by that name. It’s also known as a partner, sponsor, or associate marketing. If you’ve never made use of affiliate marketing, but you have a business to run… well, now’s the time to get cracking. You’re missing out on a new breed of marketing that is changing the landscape of business forever.
Affiliate marketing provides incentives to outside entities or affiliates to market your products. It sets up a spiderweb style marketing network where the individual strands of promotion eventually all reach into the center where you, the merchant, sits. With the advent of the net, affiliate marketing has become more effective and easy than ever before. It now requires almost no effort to make use of affiliate marketing or become an affiliate yourself. Even the prospective customers barely have to do anything to be a useful and profitable part of the affiliate marketing system.
Latest web technology has enabled the affiliate marketers to get their statistics and income figures the moment they make an affiliate sale. It is now possible to use companies like PayPal for payment and receipt processing.
Today?s technology has put an end to the times when affiliate members would have to wait for statistics to be tallied and receive payment. Affiliate programs work well for both the company offering it as well as the participating member. It gives the merchant and opportunity to market their merchandise to possible customers they may have otherwise overlooked. It also gives them advertising for a very low return fee. The affiliate benefits from being able to generate income without having to deal with the day-to-day sales aspect.
Just as the reputation of affiliate marketing has gone up, similarly the attitude of people has enhanced with respect to affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is no more regarded as an inferior method of marketing by the merchants or as a secondary source of income by an affiliate marketer. Both merchants and affiliates regard affiliate marketing as a main source of profits and revenues.
So the question now is what type of affiliate marketing will work best for you? Are all affiliate marketing programs the same? Are the benefits the same? Or are there affiliate marketing programs that work better than the others?
As with all areas of marketing there are several degrees of differences between affiliate programs. Finding what works best for you of course, depends on what kind of customer base you deal with. Another factor in determining how profitable it may be for you is to look at how much traffic or exposure your own website has. Obviously site with high traffic will generate more customers in an affiliate program than one that does not. In addition the programs themselves vary on methods of payment. There are three general categories affiliate programs use to generate income. There is the pay-per-click method (PPC), the pay-per-play method (PPP) and pay-per-performance method (PPP). Knowing your client base will greatly help you in determining which of these would work best for your site.
Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing Expert and entrepreneur who has built up multiple 7 figure online business and consults to some of leading online brands including Amazon, BBC, AIG and many others.
Tags: Adwords, Affiliate Marketing, ecommerce, Internet Marketing, pay per click, PPC, search engine optimisation, SEO, social media marketing
