Why Choose Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is advertising for someone else in
exchange for a cut of the sales you generate. You’re sharing
your traffic for a price. It’s a great way to capitalize on the
traffic your website’s already producing.

Being an
Affiliate

If you run a small, home-based eBiz, you can join an
affiliate program and get paid to share your traffic with
another merchant. You’ll want to look for sites that tie in with
yours—things your customer base will be interested in. Choose
sites whose products are complementary to yours without
overlapping.

Before you join any affiliate program, look
closely at the merchant you’ll be promoting. Find out if they
have an affiliate earnings history—can they prove their site
converts at a specific rate? Do they have an affiliate manager
you can talk to about your marketing efforts and any problems
you have? Is their program well-established? You want to make
sure they’re honest and will pay you for the conversions you
bring them.

Your goal is to make customers want to buy their
product, and then pass the customers along so the merchant can
complete the sale. Don’t just paste a link to a merchant’s
webpage and expect it to magically produce sales—tell your
customers what makes their product better than other similar
products. According to Jonathan Miller, of
http://Team-Affiliate.com, “The sites that do better are the
ones that select one or two offers, tell people why they
recommend these particular offers, and then provide them with a
link.”

Using Affiliates

You can increase your own traffic by
paying a commission to other merchants to bring you leads. As a
merchant, you should scrutinize the affiliates who advertise for
you. You’re attaching your brand to their website, so look at
their reputation—are they someone you want to be associated
with? Also look at their relevance to your target market—are
they someone that will drive the right kind of traffic?

There
are software programs that track visitors when they leave an
affiliate’s website and click through to the merchant’s site. If
they convert to a sale, the affiliate that referred them gets
paid a commission. You can track your visitors in two different
ways, and each has its own advantages:

• You can purchase stand
alone tracking software, like My Affiliate Program, and
integrate it into your site. You decide what you can afford to
pay marketers to promote you and make offers based on your
budget.

• You can join an affiliate network, such as LinkShare
or Kolimbo. This is a more costly route because the network
determines the commission percentage you pay, but they also
bring you offers from the inside and give you access to their
pool of affiliates.

Says Miller, “An affiliate program can be
very lucrative for both an affiliate marketer and a merchant…
But it takes time and effort to deliver consistent results.”


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