What is affiliate marketing and can it work for you?
More and more advertisers and leading brands are turning to the digital age of affiliate marketing as an opportunity to get great results from relatively low investment.
What can Affiliate Marketing bring your business or cause? And how does it work?
Affiliate marketing can bring more traffic and sales to your website for a relatively low cost. With thousands of affiliates out there advertising your company on their website for free you can get a lot more traffic and sales on your website from all their hard work. Companies and charities have reported 100%-600% increase in sales and signups from their websites from this form of marketing alone.
Affiliate Marketing Works in This Way
You the supplier have a product or service you want to sell and market via your website. You aren't getting great results with search engine optimisation and don't want to risk pay per click.
So you the merchant approach an affiliate program provider (a list available on request) and you add a program that you want to market. A program is a combination of text links, banner ads for your site plus a commission plan for all referrals.
The affiliate program provider adds your program to its list of programs that they offer to affiliates. They will usually charge a setup charge for this and a monthly fee per program but these should be relatively low in comparison to other forms of marketing.
Your program will then join a list available to affiliates for them to choose from to add to their website if they so wish. When they add your program to their site this means they will be showing your banner or text ad on their site. They then market their site as they see fit with the obvious varying results but some, known as super affiliates, have very large marketing budgets that a smaller company (as you may be) just don't have.
You can then benefit from their marketing as they then send traffic to your site. The way it works from here is simply that you pay them for actual sales generated from this traffic not per click (although you can do this also if you wish).
How does the Affiliate Make Money?
You the merchant pay them the commission agreed only on sales made so that your outlay for the entire program is the setup charge and small monthly fee plus any commission on actual sales. This is why this is such a fast-growing area of marketing and advertising for leading brands today.
If your affiliate does not generate any sales for you then you do not pay them a penny yet they will still be sending potential customers to your site increasing your visitors and brand awareness.
The affiliate program provider tracks all traffic generated by the affiliates all the way to the end sale making sure that they and the affiliate get their cut of the commission. They also place cookies on the prospects computers so if next time the prospect goes straight to your site then the affiliate still gets their commission for any sale made which is only fair as they have brought the customer to you in the first place.
This form of marketing is great for any company looking to sell to consumers on the internet that has a small to medium-sized marketing budget.
Make Money by Becoming an Affiliate
Also, if you are looking for a great way to make money on the internet joining an affiliate program can be very lucrative I know of one chap that is making £5million a year from this alone and it can be a business in itself.
Search Engine Marketing
Affiliate marketers tend to be experts in SEO and online marketing and as such you may have to put some restrictions on the terms they can use to market your brand so that they do not outbid you in your own marketing for Google Adwords and so on. That said it can be a great way of getting more traffic from prospects.
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