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Affiliate marketing gets in to the spaces that other campaigns can't reach

More about affiliate marketing here

Affiliate Marketing has become part of most serious online companies' marketing mix. Most major players run affiliate programmes.

The basic model for affiliate marketing is very simple. A network of website owners work with you. Affiliates work hard to generate traffic and refer it to the your website. In return they receive a commission for a desired action taken such as a click, application or sale.

By using affiliate marketing you get more exposure with your products appearing on someone else's website and you reward affiliates for each visitor or customer brought in by their marketing efforts.

Affiliare marketing has a range of benefits:

• Promotion of your site

• Increased link popularity - better site ranking

• Marketing of your product or service

• Increased visibility and branding

• Increased, targeted site traffic

• Tracked campaigns

• Increased sales

Affiliates can reach niches which you cannot so increasing your reach. Because the visitors generated are already "presold" they are more likely to purchase. Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing programs because affiliates will use all types of internet marketing opportunities – search engine optimization, paid per click, display, email and more.

Using affiliates can be done simply by creating banners that affiliates can include on their websites, email templates that affiliates can send to their database to ore complex marketing programmes that you provide to the affiliates.

Around 80% of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing PPP (Pay per Performance) as the preferred payment method. In PPP you only pay the affiliate whenever a referral translates into an action. Every time a lead or sale is made (you or the affiliate program manager track the affiliate’s referrals) a commission or fixed fee is paid into the affiliate's account.

The other alternative is Pay per Click or Per Thousand. This is the same as PPP except that the affiliate gets paid a certain amount even if the visitor he referred does not purchase anything from your site. Essentially this is the same as Google AdWords.

Affiliate marketing can also be layered. A single-tier affiliate marketing program only pays affiliates based on direct referrals. In multi-tier affiliate marketing programs, the affiliate is not only paid for the direct traffic or sales that he refers to you, but also on every traffic or sales referred by various other affiliates who joined the affiliate program through his recommendation.

In residual income affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever the customer he has referred returns to the site and purchase another product. Obviously, the more complex is the program the more complicated is the tracking.

Here are some simple tips about what an affiliate programme must achive at the very least:

1. Promote your affiliate programme. Add a link on your to a page on your website describing your affiliate programme.

2. Train your affiliates exceedingly well and make sure that they are kept up to date with any changes to your products, services and prices.

3. Market your business regularly to your affiliates. You need to make sure your affiliates are motivated to promote your business. Run a special promotions for your them.

4. Monitor the competition and make sure you know what they are paying. Match their commissions or beat them, as affiliates will promote whoever pays best.

5. Pay on time. The worst thing you can do is delay payments. Pay on time or........ same as staff!

If you want to know more about affiliate marketing and how it can help you, contact us for a chat about it.

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