Why Affiliate Marketing?
Well, it’s really simple. Because affiliate marketing in the 21st century is probably one of the easiest, if not the easiest way to make money online. Unless of course you’re a businessman and you would prefer to sell your own product instead of advertising someone else’s on your website. But even online merchants significantly benefit from affiliate programs, because the fact of the matter is, affiliate marketing works for retailers as well as it works for affiliates. It’s a win-win.
Affiliate marketing, in simple terms, is an agreement between two parties (websites), one site being the retailer’s, and the other the affiliate’s. In this partnership, the affiliate allows the merchant to advertise his/her product on the affiliate website. The retailer then has to pay the affiliate based on whatever structure they’ve agreed on (usually per sale). This generally implies fairly easy income for the affiliate. After all, all the affiliate has to do is nothing but put the merchant’s ad on the site. Again, this significantly benefits the merchant, as affiliate advertising actually costs much less than to pay a marketing company to advertise your product.
There are plenty of ways a merchant could pay his affiliate for the services, and for the affiliate, these ways simply translate into easy cash. Among the most common payment methods: are pay-per-lead, pay-per-click, and pay-per-sale. The pay-per-click method is typically the most preferred by affiliates as their site’s visitor only has to visit the advertiser’s site for them to earn money. The other two ways, on the other hand, are better preferred by the retailer, as they would only have to pay the affiliate only and if the visitor became a registrant or bought the product.
However, generating a sufficient income from just affiliate programs doesn’t depend so much on the payment method as it does on how much traffic is generated by your site. A website that attracts more visitors would typically have a much better chance of profiting in the affiliate world. It kind of is all about the volume, which means you have to stand out to make it.
How?
Incentives
Competition is very, very high in the online world. To stay on top, you have to always be one step ahead of your competitors, ensuring that you manage to capture a meaningful share of your target audience. Encourage people not to only visit your website but of course to click and proceed to take the desired action (buy the product). Building an opt-in mailing list is probably one of the best ways to gather potential clients.
Try creating autoresponders that will be mailed to those who sign up. Offer an e-zine or even maybe newsletter with updates on the industry of your niche. That’s where the freebies play an important role and can really set the tone for the affiliate-prospect relationship. Research suggests that a sale is usually closed on the sixth or seventh contact with a potential client so, give them an incentive and have patience.
Link Popularity
I cannot begin to emphasize enough the gravity of driving highly targeted traffic to your site. Building your online presence and driving people to visit your site should be the first step in your strategy.
Do everything in your power to achieve the highest possible search engine ranking. Link Popularity is one of the determiners that search engines use to rank. This means you have to boost your link popularity, and perhaps launching an aggressive reciprocal link campaign is the way to go.
So to sum up, from the retailer’s point of view, plenty of money can be saved on advertising by partnering up with an affiliate. From the affiliate’s point of view, there’s a lot of profits to be made by just by doing what they do best, creating websites and advertising. This is what I love about affiliation, everyone’s happy, everyone’s making money. Don’t you think it’s about time you kickstarted your earnings?
