Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Data Related to Associate Marketing

By Cynthia Cash


Affiliate Marketing is a principle that involves sales and network partnerships between different enterprises, based on fashioning agreements between partners (affiliates) for advertising for particular offers. The method of compensation for affiliates can be individual and variable, and can therefore occur as barter, without necessarily involving payment. Critical to the success of this form of advertising is the selection of suitable, related partners whose sites receive a great deal of traffic.

Affiliate marketing is basically a means of making money online whereby the publisher/blogger is given a commission for helping a business promote their products or services. Think of the commission as a reward that you get simply for offering this service. It is worth noting that there are numerous variations of affiliate marketing. However, the most common is where the publishers get the commission after their visitors follow a link to another website where they purchase a particular product or service. Every visitor that you refer over and actually makes a purchase is referred to as a conversion. Thus, the concept is simple. The more conversions you have, the more your earn via your affiliate marketing campaign.

This arrangement benefits vendors because through the leveraging powers of platforms such as Clickbank and Commission Junction, they have access to thousands of eager affiliate marketers willing to sell their products. Instead of hiring an army of salespersons, they can rely on these marketers to make their sales. At the same time, marketers benefit by not having to worry about any overheads, storage, shipping, or customer service. The marketer is essentially acting as a broker, directing the customer to the vendor's site where he can make a purchase decision. Because of the low barrier to entry, anyone can start with an affiliate marketing business with absolutely zero investment.

Affiliate programs require good tracking software to track leads and sales made by each affiliate. For this reason and others, companies may choose to work with an affiliate network. Large affiliate networks usually provide tracking, reporting, ad hosting, and the ability to engage a large number of affiliates. Affiliate networks act as a third party between the merchant and the affiliates, and they usually charge businesses a percentage of the commission earned by affiliates.

Sponsorships can be an effective way to position your company's products and services on web sites that feature a synergistic product or target the audience that you would like to reach. Sponsorships can be purchased on news, finance, entertainment, and a variety of special interest web sites. The sponsor pays a fee and receives acknowledgement in the form of advertising or promotion for paying a fee to sponsor an event, a service, content such as a report, or other service. For example, a financial services business might be interested in sponsoring part of a financial news website. If you market a consumer product targeted at women, you may wish to sponsor content that will reach a large number of people in your target market, such as the Oprah web site. The Breaking Zero Blog (www.breakingzero.com) is one such well established affiliate program.




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