Affiliate marketing is a pivotal player in business promotion. Many online recruiters (typically site owners) who are interested and interacting on your own site are known as affiliates. Activities range from posting advertisements, which tend to be banners or links of your products or services on their website. Your advertisements, which the affiliate displays, encourage users to visit your website. The ads are specifically coded to decide how much people are visiting your website through that advertisement, and to track after the ad is live. In other types of online advertising, a user pays for placing advertisements on websites, whereas in affiliate marketing an affiliate is paid when the advertisement (running on his/her website) produces a desired result.
Here’s five top tips to kick starting your affiliate activity:
- Sign up to an affiliate program – Essentially, selecting a program which offers recurring commissions can grow month on month as you refer more customers
- Research the right affiliate programs for your business – What products are most popular and what is the relevant conversion rate? An example of a strong conversion rate (5%) means that for every 100 people landing on your merchant’s site, five vistors will put down an order.
- Promote an affiliate program through a website – If you create a website specifically to promote the various facets of your affiliate programs, you’ll have more options in alerting potential buyers to your affiliate programs. Benchmark against other professional industry sites for brainstorming ideas
- Relevant content drives the right traffic – Here’s a starter for ten, if your affiliate sells iPads, write a review or make a short video for each model type of iPad with an affiliate link to the sales site
- Driving targeted traffic comes as standard. Here’s a few sales channels and metrics to drive that volume:
-> PPC Advertising – One of the most important aspects of PPC advertising programs is via targeted traffic. Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing are key players in this space. This type of advertising works around an auction model, using keywords to drive relevant users to your site. To run through a working example, when a user enters a search term matches your keyword in the PPC search engine and presses the search button, your contextual ad will appear (typically) on the sidebar of the search result page. If the visitor clicks through your ad to your website, you’ll be charged based on your top bid amount. Also, PPC advertising programs will distribute your ads to websites of their content networks also.
-> Forum Messaging – Posting messages on community forums with a link to your site embedded within the signature of each message. Populate your forum profile with your website link within the signature option. This is fairly labour-intensive, but certainly a worthwhile exercise nevigating pages of popular and relevant forums. Ask questions and post informative, timely replies to other peoples’ questions or messages to build your status. Sites like Quora are good for boosting your profile. The more you’re a trusted source and advisor, the more authority you will have in the broader digital ecosystem.
-> Article Marketing – Try jotting down an article related to your affiliate products with a link to your website in the article’s resource box and submit it to renowned article directories. For a continuous, sustained flow of targeted traffic, up the ante on number of articles. However, ensure more articles are SEO optimised and have quality copy. Aim for one new article per week as a minimum.
-> Post videos on You Tube about the product you wish to publicize – These video reviews are the quickest and the most effective way to build trust by showing the benefits of the product in real time. Don’t forget, Google acquired You Tube back in 2006 so videos index extremely well in the SERPs listings. You can even provide a link under the video and you can encourage your visitors to purchase the product through your affiliate link.
-> Pay per impression – This means that affiliate earns a profit whenever an affiliate advertisement is displayed. Whenever a unique visitor views an advertisement, the affiliate is paid a certain amount. This is calculated using a number of factors and will be agreed by the advertiser and the affiliate before the affiliate begins diaplaying the ads.
-> Pay per lead – In this program, the affiliate is paid when a visitor after clicking on the advertisement performs certain action such as registering with the website or by completing a survey, for example.
If your route to market is online, then affiliate marketing is a no-brainer. If done correctly, it can produce substantiated and measurable results for your business. Even if affiliate marketing is not done correctly, it may not be financially disadvantageous to your business. Affiliate marketing is a program in which you pay your affiliates only when some desired outcome is produced from their efforts.
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