"A system of advertising in which site A agrees to feature buttons from site B, and site A gets a commission on any sales generated for site B. It can also be applied to situations in which an advertiser may be looking for marketing information, rather than a cash sale. Popular among startups with very small marketing budgets."This is what you get when you do a search in Google for
definition of Affiliate Marketing.
I still remember, my early days of induction into world of Internet Marketing, more specifically "Affiliate Marketing."
Till then, I was completely oblivious to this term. For most of us, Affiliate marketing is a term that has different meanings. Let me first move to other side of line and say that affiliate marketing is nothing but unnecessary pop ups, newsletter spam, affiliate tracking code cloaking and much more.
Now from other side of line, Affiliate Marketing is a way to market your products online by signing up affiliates who have websites and are willing to advertise your products on their site, in return earning a certain percentage of commission from sales they generate.
If you take a closer look, for one particular product or a company, you will find server loads of affiliates, marketing company or a product. Now this is an indicator to itself of way you market your products on Internet.
To talk about Affiliate Marketing, this one article would not suffice. Hence, I have divided it into a series of articles. Although I am very tempted to first write about "The tools to improve an affiliate's conversions" let me stick to chronology.
Why does a company need an affiliate program?
Having defined, affiliate marketing, next obvious question that arises is, why a company needs affiliates when it can market its products on its own.
To answer this, while a company may be very huge in terms of infrastructure, or has a really successful product, it cannot sit silent and bank on its own strengths. Further to this, a company cannot customize look and feel of site to suit tastes of local markets. Although there are tools where you can cloak your website, it would involve a lot of complexity in terms of technical and marketing demands. Hence, arises need for affiliates.
What makes a company look for affiliates?
Let’s face it. Every website which has a decent hit rate does enjoy a certain niche market. It is mostly for smaller sites that you see a higher percentage of customer loyalty. There are various reasons to this; one most obvious factor is service and personalization provided by smaller sites. It is sites like these which attract companies to negotiate them into signing up as an affiliate.
The mistakes most companies make: In my experience, working with affiliate program, one huge error made was that most companies which are into affiliate marketing just design specs and set it up on their website and wait for webmasters to sign up with them.
Now you never know kind of traffic you would be attracting. This where 80:20 rule comes in picture and that is how most of companies strategize their affiliate marketing efforts.
A more detailed article about this can be found, entitled: "Eliminating 80:20 rule"
Do you think you are ready to sign up as an affiliate?
Perhaps, for most of us, this question never seem to arise because of fact that commissions offered to an affiliate is huge enough to blind us from most basic and simple facts to begin with. Let’s face it, if a company offers you a huge commission for selling their products, you can rest assured that it will take you a lot of time and effort to make a single sale. I would not quote any numbers here as commissions differ from one market sector product to another.
