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Introduction .......................................................................................................................3 Chapter One .....................................................................................................................4 What is Affiliate Marketing? ..........................................................................................4 The Basic Plan ..........................................................................................................4 Why an In-house Affiliate Program is Great ..............................................................5 Common Terms ............................................................................................................5 Chapter Two .....................................................................................................................8 Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Program ......................................................................8 Search Engine Jargon Clarified .................................................................................8 SEO, PPC and Affiliates ............................................................................................9 Strong Words on Affiliate Networks ...........................................................................9 Chapter Three ................................................................................................................11 Helping Affiliates with Business ..................................................................................11 Making Life Easier ...................................................................................................11 Be Sure to Individualize ...........................................................................................12
Introduction
Do you have a website? If you answered yes to that question then you should know that you can actually generate income and far more profit if you incorporate an affiliate program into your site. This is among the most modern forms of marketing and it works in a very simple way. You create a system that rewards affiliates for electronically encouraging valuable traffic to visit your website and/or make a purchase of some kind. There are many ways that affiliate marketing can work, but fundamentally it is a wonderful way to reach an audience that has a valid interest in what you offer, but which may not automatically find its way to your site. The classic example is the affiliate marketing done by Amazon.com. They have more than five hundred thousand affiliates at the time of this writing and each of them will use their affiliate tools differently. The one similarity between them all, however, is that they are all driving extremely valuable internet traffic back to the original merchant site! This is done without any further input on the part of Amazon.com, and they are paying only small amounts for all of this fundamentally free traffic. You can do the same thing if you use affiliate marketing programs and choose the most appropriate affiliates for your particular message, products, or site. This book is going to walk you through the basic details and explain the many reasons why you need to explore affiliate marketing if you want to dramatically increase the size of your bottom line!
Chapter One
What is Affiliate Marketing?
The most basic possible answer to the question of what is an affiliate program is that it is a method for making far more money from your website than you had originally intended. It works in the simplest ways possible, but you have to understand a few things before you can make it really work for your business. What do you need to know? Well, the fundamental structure and flow of affiliate marketing is going to be the first thing to master.
They do so in the simplest of ways; they pay commissions to the affiliates for posting links that lead traffic back to their site. Some give commissions only if a purchase is made, but some provide compensation only if the affiliates link is put to use. Naturally, this means that affiliate programs all work in different ways, but have the same general results.
Common Terms
These results include the merchant, the affiliate, and the consumer using the Internet. The merchant, for this book, is your business and the affiliate is anyone with whom you cooperate and compensate for delivering traffic, or the consumer, to your site. You might do this through: Pay per purchase agreements This sends a commission to the affiliate at any time that a sale results from a consumer using their link to get to the merchant site.
Pay per lead This is an affiliate program that provides compensation if a link from an affiliates page leads to a consumer providing their contact information (becoming a lead).
Pay per click This is the type of affiliate program that rewards an affiliate whenever a consumer clicks on the link embedded in the affiliate site.
What is so interesting about the ways that affiliate programs are structured is that there can be compensation based on a one time event, or things can continue indefinitely into the future if that benefits the merchant and the affiliate more. For instance, there can be the: Tier system This allows the affiliate to profit from its own activities AND to profit from any activities generated by its recruits. For instance, the Amway company is famous for its multiple tiers of affiliates who are continually earning a small percentage of their own recruited affiliates sales. Residual system Yhis is an arrangement that permanently links a consumer to an affiliate. For instance, someone buys dahlia tubers through a link that you have embedded at your informational website (this is from our earlier example). If you remain an affiliate, you will continue to earn a small profit from all future purchases made by that consumer. This is also the sort of system used in subscription or service sites that have monthly fees associated with them. Before choosing the type of rewards and systems to use, you have to understand that all affiliate programs that are successful tend to be so because they choose companies, affiliates, products, or sites that partner well with what they have to offer. Lets go back to that dahlia site that we used as an example. This is not the sort of informational or content driven site that would find affiliates interested in dog food. They would be far better off if they chose to accept affiliate offers from fertilizer sites, flower seed sellers, etc.
This takes us into the subject of the next chapter, which is the best way to market an affiliate program. What does the type of affiliate have to do with promoting the program? Well, just consider some final terms that you will hear a lot when discussing marketing of any kind SEO and PPC marketing. These are the two chief ways to ensure website success, but they are also directly related to properly marketing your affiliate program.
Chapter Two
Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Program
Though many business and website owners are aghast at the recent changes to the Google algorithm, known as the infamous Panda upgrade, these changes havent really negatively impacted well marketed affiliate programs. This is because a savvy website owner is going to market their affiliate options to a suitable set of candidates through things like traditional SEO and PPC advertising, which are always going to reach the most suitable audience possible.
Just consider that traditional affiliate marketing requires: The ID number for the affiliate A system of links that the affiliates can use without fail A website that works with the links given to the affiliates, and which can include: o Specific product pages o Affiliates only storefronts o Special home pages o Regular pages All of these things will have to head to the merchant URL, which is going to have to have some sort of program for managing when an affiliate link has sent a visitor to the site. It will then have to ensure that the visitor is at the actual merchant site and use cookies of some kind to keep track of the affiliate-generated activities. The affiliate networks can do all of that, plus they tend to offer even more types of management options. They can often report on the number of clicks that an affiliates links generated, track sales or enrollment that resulted from an affiliates various links, and even keep track of the total number of website visitors to an affiliates site who viewed the merchants information. The networks are also great for reporting to the merchants the amount of money that an affiliate is due on a weekly or monthly basis. Are we strongly advocating networks? If you can afford setup fees, we believe that these are usually the simplest and most effective ways of administrating your affiliate programs.
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Chapter Three
Helping Affiliates with Business
You have done the SEO and PPC campaigns meant to give you a strong position in the search engine results. You have worked with some of the best affiliate networks in order to appear in their directories and listings. You are also advertising your affiliate program directly through your website. This all means that you are probably getting some inquiries about affiliate opportunities, and now is the time to understand what YOU can do for the affiliates in order to help them to promote your site.
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Banners and Boxes These are graphics that are clickable when the coding is embedded properly into the affiliates page. These are very appealing when they use an image of an item or the logo of a company.
Product Links You can always streamline everything and provide the affiliate with a link that takes visitors directly to the product page for the item.
Registration Links If you are seeking to acquire leads through your affiliates, it may be a wise idea to give them links that get all of the details after the consumer has clicked the very first link.
Storefront Links These can be a bit of a high maintenance issue because you as the merchant have to ensure that the links are taking visitors to the most appropriate and up to date pages. Basically, they send visitors to a fabricated store page that is connected to the merchant site, but related directly to the affiliate products or information.
Shared Page Links you may have seen these already and not known it. These are links that drive the visitor to a page that has an identical appearance to the merchants page, but which is actually run by the merchant site. This is a very common system for affiliate programs for products.
Of course, you can always send all links directly to your website homepage as well. This is not the most direct approach because it means that some visitors have to navigate to the area of interest or because it may not get as many leads as desired. If, however, the only goal of the affiliate program is to get people to that homepage, it is perfectly acceptable to create a single, universal link.
Be Sure to Individualize
Remember, however, that any and all links provided to your affiliates have to be generated with their specific ID number and tracking information. This is the main
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reason that we have recommended the use of networks. They often generate all of these links upon the request of the affiliate, and cannot be incorrect or fail to function. What IS usually in your hands is the maintenance of the website and all of the pages related to affiliate marketing and the information or products it is meant to promote. If you keep things simple, however, it is likely that your affiliates will be able to use the necessary links in a simple and straightforward manner. Soon, you will be creating or receiving the reports that you need to see the results of the affiliate program and to determine just how much traffic and profit it has generated for your site. Most merchants are astounded to see that they are capable of creating a few hundred dollars per month almost immediately, and many also see four and five figure digits very quickly!
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