Affiliate Marketing for your Business?

What is Affiliate marketing? According to Wikipedia, Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing gives your business access to a vast network of sites to promote your products. This vast network drives traffic to your website. Most of the time, it is done through an affiliate management company. These companies already have hundreds of thousands of publishers in their network, you just need to offer these publishers a lucrative commission to attract them to promote your products. You can also increase your commission at different sales tier to encourage publishers to work harder to push your products.

You usually offer your affiliate network discount coupons or special offers for them to promote to their visitors. These offers should be updated in a timely manner to keep the offer fresh and make the visitors come back regularly for your offers.

In my opinion, customers acquired through affiliate marketing are either bargain seeker or people looking for extra value for their purchase (i.e. point collector). Some of your affiliates might offer points/ cash back to their members. For point collectors, most of the time they don’t mind buying a higher priced item, since they can get more points/ cash back out of their purchase. For bargain seeker, they searched through the web for discount coupons before making their purchase. With affiliate marketing, on top of other marketing methods, you can acquire different type of customer, not to miss out any one of them.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to increase your products’ exposure. Of course there is a cost associated with affiliate marketing. Besides paying the commission own to the performing publishers, you would also need to pay your affiliate management company a management fee. The fee differs from one management company to another. Check out the affiliate management companies below and see if there is a program right for your business. (of course there are more than 5, search on the web for more)

1) Commission Junction
2) Linkshare
3) CX Digital Affiliate Network
4) Hydra Network
5) Panthera Network

If you are a publisher, you can join one of these networks and post ads on your website. You can make money when someone referred by your site made a purchase. However, some vendors do not approve all sites but only quality site they think are relevant. Make sure your site is functioning well before applying to be one of their affiliates.