Affiliate Marketing

Provided By Dr Michael Teng
Like in the traditional businesses in which you make "associates" to sell your products for a
commision, you can have "affiliates" on the net selling your products through their websites
for a commision.

The affiliates have the information about your products and services on their websites for the
surfers of their websites. If a surfer attempts to have more information on the same and click
on the specific product or service link they are routed to your website wherein they can continue
and choose to make a purchase.
www.Amazon.com is known for its world famous Associate Program.

This "routing" is tracked and the owner of the website from where the link originated is given
"credits" or simply speaking is paid a commission as he has assisted the sale of your product.
The commission can be anywhere between 5 to 20% of the sale and depends upon the nature
of products, the parent company and product pricing.

Who can be an affiliate?
Any website which has the confidence to divert visitors to the parent business' website is
eligible to become an affiliate irrespective of its size and turnover.

Who can start an affiliate program?
Any company or business trying to expand, take advantage of other website's traffic and have
multiple sale points all across the web normally goes ahead to start an affiliate program.

How do you get your own affiliate?
You have an option of either starting up your own affiliate program or join an existing one and then
branch out. You would need to pay for both. If you want to start your own affiliate program you
would need to buy the software that will help you manage your program you would need to buy
the software that will help you manage your program by keeping statistics of total clicks, number
of visitors, leads, purchases, individual traffic from all affiliates, payments due, and so on.

On the other hand, joining an existing program would mean that you would have the management
taken care of by third party including having your banner ads and links distributed to your affiliates.
The affiliate programs you join will let you (mostly) make your affiliates and link to other websites
interested in linking to you.

How do you link affiliates to your website?
There are various ways you can have your affiliates' link to your site and route visitors.

1. Banner
   A banner is the easiest to recognize and can have both text and graphics with good use of color
   and text effects. Visitors can click on this banner and land up to your home page.
2. Text links
   This is another method of routing visitors on your affiliates' website to yours. You can have your
   link in the content of your affiliate site, clicking on which, the visitors land up on your site. This is
   a subtler form of advertising that a banner which might get too loud.

You can think of more innovative measures to invite surfers to your website.

How are the affiliates paid?

• Pay Per Click
You can choose to pay your affiliates by the number of surfers who visit their website and are
routed to yours by clicking on the "Affiliate Button" on your affiliate's website. If you pay as per
pay per click, you will pay your affiliate according to the total number of visitors he sent across
to your site.
- PPC has a basic flaw that even if an affiliate of yours does route visitors to you, the visitors
may just surf around and might not actually buy anything from your site.

• Pay Per Lead
However, the very fact they clicked the link and visited your website gives ample proof that they
in one way or the other were interested in your product, but could not take a buying decision
immediately. You would surely like to have contact details of these visitors whom you can
contact from time to time to promote your products.

You can collect the contact addresses of these visitors routed to your site by your affiliate by
making them fill an enquiry form at your website. This way you get a lead for your sales team
to take further action.

In Pay Per Lead method, you pay your affiliate on the number of visitors it diverted to your site,
but for those who actually filled up the form and left their contact address even though if they
did not buy anything for now.

• Pay Per Sale
In this method of determining payment, you pay according to the purchases made by the
visitors routed to your website by your affilate. You don't pay for visiting, and you don't pay
for leaving details. A sale is what matters and you agree to pay a percentage on the total
sales made to your affiliate.

You may choose to pay your affiliates again if the customers make repeat purchases as well.
This is called Residual Payment Program and ensures a certain sum of money to the affiliate
while you make customers for lifetime.

HOWEVER you will need to keep a hawk's eye on the number of visitors:
√ Clicking on your banner ad at affiliate's website
√ Clicking on your link at the affiliate's website
√ Leaving their contact address and preferences
√ Actually making a purchase

It is very important to know as it will help you determine the payments to be made to your
various affiliates. It will also help you compare and contrast the performances of your
affiliates and plan accordingly.

If you find the task of managing the statistics too cumbersome, you can consider hiring the
services of "affiliate brokers". Affiliate brokers are responsible for managing your affiliates.
They take care of your banners and links on affiliate's websites, keep stats of the visitors on
your website, total leads generated, total purchases made, and keep an account of the money
to be paid to each affiliate along with the data on the individual affiliate performance.

You may also consider using affiliate management software which helps you subscribe to
various affiliate programs on the net and measure individual performance and thus give you
enough information to decide the best and most profitable ones and plan accordingly.