Me & the Boss

Me & the Boss

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Affiliate marketing defined

By Clint Larlee

Even though affiliate marketing has been around forever (used to be called Revenue Sharing) the internet has made it much more powerful and effective! Many of the internet giants of today like Amazon, Yahoo and Google used affiliate marketing to get them where they are today! Now 90% of the successful companies online use affiliate marketing as the back bone of their marketing plan.

Affiliate marketing offers many advantages to online merchants. It is an easy way to hire and train a very large group of highly motivated sales team rather quickly and with little to no risk! The sign up process requires no interview. The training is all online and if the partnership does not work out there are no hard feelings and no one gets hurt / fired!

This type of marketing is very beneficial to the affiliate for many of the same reasons. There is no interview process to endure. There are no products to purchase. You can work from home. You are in control of your time and your income potential. Many affiliates make multiple six figure incomes on virtual auto pilot!

How does it work? An affiliate goes to a merchant's website and signs up as an affiliate by simply filling out a 5 minute computer generated form. The new affiliate is then provided with their Affiliate Tools which usually includes some banner ads, online training and an affiliate link (a URL encoded with the affiliate info and directed to the merchant's site) this is used as a tracking tool; if a customer arrives at the merchants site via this link and makes a purchase or clicks on an ad (depending on the agreement). If the customers do not use the affiliate link to reach the merchants site, the affiliate will not get credit for the sales/clicks he/she generates.

Some companies will pay a fixed commission to the affiliate every time a customer clicks on an ad on their site. Other companies pay a flat rate commission when a customer makes a product purchase; this arrangement is the most common of all (only about 1% of all companies use a cost-per-click remuneration system).

Top affiliate marketers use a variety of techniques to generate leads and send them to the merchant's site. The way this is done is out of the scope of this article. Basically, leads are attracted to a site via ads etc. The affiliates site then filters and redirects the customers (via the affiliate link) to the merchant's site. Email marketing, blogs, rss feeds and many other kinds of on-line communication tools are also used to direct targeted traffic to the merchant's site.

This was just a brief overview. There is a lot more to this business. It takes some time to set up but it is worth it. For both the Affiliate and the Merchant this style of marketing is win / win. No costs are incurred by either the Merchant or the Affiliate. The sign up (hiring process) is free for both merchant and stress free for the affiliate (no intervies process). Training is done online which is economical for both the merchant and the affiliate. Placing links and banners on the affiliate's site is free and the merchant only pays the affiliate if and when a sale is made

Affiliate marketing is a powerful way to grow a business and the best way to make money online (or offline for that matter)!

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