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What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is basically a revenue sharing arrangement in which
advertisers (merchants) distribute sales collateral (banners, text links, etc.)
and recruit partners, called affiliates, who agree to display the advertisements
on their web sites in exchange for a commission on any leads or sales that
result from actions derived from those advertisements.
So, really, affiliate marketing harkens back to marketing in its purest form.
The second oldest business there is: “If you sell something for me, I’ll give
you a percentage”. It is simply the use of a web site to sell products or
recruit customers in a way that’s been used for centuries!
Affiliate marketing is also known by a series of names, including:
- Associate Programs
- Internet Affiliate Marketing
- Direct Marketing
- Performance Marketing
- Partner Marketing
- Pay-For-Performance Programs
- Referral Programs
In affiliate marketing programs, an affiliate earns a commission from a merchant
for generating a desired action, such as a lead or sale, for a merchant that the
affiliate is promoting. The merchant provides its ads (also called creatives) to
affiliates and offers a pre-determined commission for each action it wants
visitors to take. Affiliates place a tracking code for these ads on their
websites, in search listings or in their email campaigns. Whenever a visitor
uses these links to generate the desired action on the merchant site, these
online actions are tracked and recorded by a reliable tracking program. When
the desired action is verified, the affiliate is paid a commission for that
verified desired action.
Affiliate recruitment is the most important and the most time consuming element
of building a successful affiliate marketing program. Identifying who the best
affiliates are for your site, persuading them to join your program and giving
them compelling reasons to stay with you and sell, are all critical elements of
success in this channel. We believe the key to a successful affiliate program is
recruiting high quality affiliates that have contextually relevant sites to
yours and who have proved track records driving traffic to programs they belong
to.
We go after affiliates in three categories: Top - Known "super" affiliates whose
business model is based on affiliate revenue Primary - Those affiliates already
successfully working in your industry niche Secondary - Sites whose content is
complementary to your site's products who can be motivated to begin promoting
your products on their sites Each type is part of the success formula and it's
the synergy of all three that create a consistent and balanced program. Our
proactive, creative, powerful, concentrated approach includes; Recruitment
through virtually every facet of both your niche market and main stream
markets. We don't just submit you to the portals and wait, we don't just go
after sites that your site will complement, and we work to develop and uncover
new opportunities. We place ourselves in your customers' minds and acquire an
understanding of their behavior, then we find out were they go and place you
everywhere they are. We gain understanding of your competition through research
we integrate you into the path of you competitions' customers and affiliates.
What we do when recruiting and acquiring affiliates:
 | Manual submission to all major affiliate program portals and directories twice a year |
| Heavy Forum PR and recruitment on Top Affiliate Boards |
| 50-100 of targeted emails sent weekly to potential affiliates |
| Post and monitor your program in DirectLeads Advertising Network of 11,000 affiliates (if applicable) |
| Search Engine spidering for prospects linked to your competitors or using your keywords |
| Use Niche Directories for prospecting |
| Ezines, E-books, Newsgroups & E-newsletter searches for relevant affiliates |
| Top Sites strategic Partnerships explored |
| Online shopping Malls, Coupon & Freebie sites reviewed for appropriate rev-share deals |
Advertisers and Publishers: Two sides of a winning arrangement
The advertisers/merchants are typically referred to as affiliate merchants and the publishers/salespeople are referred to as affiliates.
Benefits of affiliate marketing include the potential for automating much of the
advertising process (accepting and approving applications, generating unique
sales links, tracking and reporting of results) and payment only for desired
results (sales, registrations or clicks).
Paying only for performance shifts much of the advertising risk from the
merchants to the affiliates, although merchants still assume some risk of fraud
from partner sites.
Affiliate marketing has contributed to the rise of many leading online
companies. Amazon.com, one of the first significant adopters, now has hundreds
of thousands of affiliate relationships. It is not uncommon to see industries
where the major players have affiliate programs--often structured in a similar
manner and making similar competitive changes over time.
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