Small Business News Feeds -
|
|
|
Affiliate Marketing
An Affiliate Marketer or "associate" is someone who actively promotes the
products or services of one or more businesses, and receives
commissions on sales. It's really that simple. The "merchant", a term given to the company who provides the product or service to be sold, has full responsibility for designing, manufacturing and fulfillment of orders, the affiliate focuses only on selling.
This may be the ideal way to start to generate income, working from home, particularly if your skills are in the field of marketing. By their nature, most affiliate programs are designed to be promoted on the Internet, so consider also that you'll need some specific web skills before you start.
The protocol for becoming an affiliate is as follows -
- Find a product or service that you want to sell.
- Search the web looking for merchants who offer that product, and find merchants who advertise an "Affiliate Program".
- Find several if you can and compare their commissions and terms of the program. You'll want to find the highest commission possible but also look for the minimum monthly payment, which is what you'll have to make in commissions before you get a payout. Also, there are several affiliate program providers who provide "managed" services to merchants. These companies take over all aspects of affiliate management, including cutting commission checks. The benefit of joining a managed program like this is that you'll generally be paid reliably. Checkout www.linkshare.com and www.cj.com who are two of the longest established affiliate management services in the business.
- Once you've found a merchant, sign-up to their program. You will then receive your unique affiliate tracking code/link which contains your affiliate ID. Click here to understand what an affiliate tracking code is, it's important.
- Now that you've signed up you will generally want to use the tools provided to you by the merchant for promoting his products. The better merchants will provide their affiliates with support in a variety of formats. You should at a minimum be able to select marketing banners, textual ads and product information clips from within your affiliate control panel.
- Now, armed with your affiliate link and your marketing tools you are ready to start promoting the program and hopefully making commissions on sales. How you do this will vary depending on your level of experience with Internet marketing. Most people have some type of website, where they place their affiliate links and start to draw visitors to theit web page, who are them directed to "click on the link" and are transported off to the merchant website to buy something.
Broadly speaking there are six methods of promoting a website
on the Internet:
1. Through the Internet Search Engines. (organic listings, non-paid)
2. Pay-per-click search engines
3. Opt-in (subscription) email lists.
4. Ezines, article submission sites and reputable Business to
Business resource sites.
5. Banner advertising, both pay-per-click and reciprocal banner
exchanges.
6. Unsolicited Email (Spam)
We do not advocate
the use of unsolicited email, and recommend that you give it a wide berth.
The use of a combination of Banner advertising, opt-in
email lists, and Ezines will get some traffic to your website quite quickly.
The quickest way to get traffic is via Pay-per-click search engines like Google and Yahoo. These offer a service where your ad is diplayed when people type in a keyword that matches keywords you have chosen. When they click on your ad, they land at your page, and you are charged a fee for the "click". How much you are charged depends on how much you have bid to receive that specific click. The higher your bid, the more times your ad will be shown and the more clicks you will receive. In competitive businesses, receiving Pay-Per-Click (PPC) can be very expensive and you'll need to track this activity to make sure you get a positive return on your ad investment.
Much more on this subject to follow.
|
