Affiliate Programs

Another form of advertising your business is through Affiliate links. Of course with some websites you may have to offer a reciprocal link in return, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Using this method, you could significantly reduce your advertising costs.

Definition of Affiliate Programs

An Affiliate program is where one web site - the affiliate has a link to another web site - the Merchant. The affiliate web site gets paid for the amount of traffic or sales that have generated from their link to the Merchant web site. There are different kinds of affiliate programs available.

Types of Affiliate Programs Available

Pay Per Click

When Pay per Click is offered to affiliates, this will mean that the affiliate will get paid for how many visitors visit the Merchant site. The visitors do not necessarily have to purchase anything.

Pay Per Sale

Pay per Sale means that the affiliate will get paid when a purchase is actually made. The amount paid per purchase will depend on the Merchant sites terms. It could be a straight fee or a percentage of the cost of the purchase.

Pay Per Lead

Some companies offer an affiliate program which pays the affiliate based on the number of visitors they refer to the Merchant site. Basically this usually means that the visitor will be required to fill out a form with information requested by the Merchant site. These leads are then possibly used as a sales lead or sold on to another company as a sales lead.

There is a lot of administrative work involved in maintaining affiliate programs, so you will need to take this into consideration if you decide to offer affiliate programs from your E-commerce site.

Affiliate Program Networks

There is an alternative to doing the administration of affiliate programs yourself. Using an Affiliate Network who will act as the middle man could be the solution for you if you have neither the time nor the inclination to administer affiliate programs yourself. Tracking all activity, sort out payments and offer assistance to affiliates with links and suchlike. Again, research is needed if you decide to go down this route as benefits and features offered by Affiliate Networks will vary. Most will provide a help centre, and an area where traffic statistics can be viewed.

Various Selling ways with Affiliate Programs

There are various ways that you can choose to sell through affiliate programs. You can build an affiliate website for a single product, creating an affiliate website with a several affiliate products and adding chosen affiliate programs to an existing website that relates to a specific product. Although each of these will entail rather different steps to apply, they will gain from the same marketing techniques.

Opting for a single product affiliate program will allow you to dedicate more resources; this especially works well if promoting a more expensive product. Keyword implementation is better concentrated which in turn may attract more traffic than having numerous products. Where possible, endeavour to purchase or use an existing domain name, it can take a long time for search engines to have confidence in a new domain.

If you have an existing website, both that and the affiliate program will benefit from web traffic. Websites need to be continually updated with fresh unique content to gain good search engine rankings. Implementing affiliate programs are a perfect way to add to your sites content. Consequently, you will improve your sites ranking in the search engines and make financial gains from your affiliate program.

Using several affiliate programs on one site is a more cost efficient method in regards to hosting and domain name expenditure. Also, the chances of making a sale can increase; the drawback though, is that it could cost you more in the long run in advertising costs and time. Another possible disadvantage is a lesser number of main keywords will be used– maybe resulting in less traffic. One solution is to keep all of your affiliate programs associated with a particular topic.

Affiliate Merchant Tracking Methods

The majority of affiliate merchants use cookies to track sales with affiliate program marketers. The length of the referral period will differ from merchant to merchant. For example, a 60 day cookie means that if the cookie is set for 60 days, you should get the affiliate commission whether the buyer purchases directly from your site or from the merchant site in the 60 days period.

When the visitor buys from the merchant site, the purchase procedure is reads the affiliate details from the cookies so you acquire the commission.
The problem with cookie tracking is if the buyer has their cookies disabled through their security program or clears them inadvertently, then it would result in a lost sale.

Author: PhillMedia