Affiliate Marketing Tips

Before we get into some affiliate marketing tips, let's make sure we are on the same page regarding what affiliate marketing programs are.

The What

By way of definition, an affiliate is a commercial entity that has a relationship with another, usually larger, entity.

For example, in a radio network or TV network, an affiliate is a radio station or TV station that agrees to carry the broadcasts of the network.

Now, to make sure that the affiliate marketing tips I provide make sense to as many people visiting this page as possible, I am going to cover some basics first.

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses. Affiliates are rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, or sale provided through the affiliate’s efforts. Affiliates are usually compensated based upon a certain value for each exposure, visit, registrant, new customer, or sale.

Many business owners with web sites for their businesses like affiliate marketing because the business owner only pays for the marketing when results are realized.

Affiliate Marketing Tips - #1: Don’t discount this method of marketing on the internet – or your ability to make money as an affiliate. Many businesses contribute a lot of their growth and success to developing and implementing an affiliate marketing program.

Now let's look at how affiliate marketing programs work:

Basically, an affiliate has his or own web site. That web site, or a portion of it, relates to something that another business owner sells. So, the affiliate provides a link on his/her site that brings visitors who click on the link to the business owner’s site. If the visitor who clicked over to the business owner’s site makes a purchase, then the affiliate is compensated.

Now, the above explanation is a very basic one. Meaning, there are several types of affiliate sites:

Content and niche sites, such as product review sites, are affiliate sites.

Directories are affiliate sites.

Loyalty affiliate sites provide a reward system, such as points back or cash back, for purchases made.

Search affiliates use pay per click search engines and promote advertisers’ offers.

Sites that provide comparison-shopping are affiliate sites.

Coupon and rebate sites that focus on sales promotions are affiliate sites.

Affiliate Marketing Tips - #2: Research and consider your marketing options. As an affiliate, you're the marketer. Pick the best way for you to make money with affiliate marketing programs. Consider how much time, money, and resources you have as well as what you're learning curve is going to be.

I have a few more affiliate marketing tips for you, but want to explain how you make money as an affiliate marketer.

There are several ways in which affiliates in affiliate marketing programs make money:

Pay-per-sale (PPS) or Cost-per-sale (CPS):
The business owner pays the affiliate a percentage of the amount of each sale that was generated by a customer who was referred by the affiliate.

Pay-per-impression (PPI) or Cost-per-thousand (CPM):
The affiliate receives from the business owner a specified amount of money for every 1000 page views or displays of the business owner’s advertisement. The advertisement can be text, a banner image or rich media.

Pay-per-lead (PPL) or Cost-per-action/acquisition (CPA) or Cost-per-lead CPL):
The business owner pays the affiliate a specified commission for every visitor that was referred by the affiliate to the business owner’s web site and performs a desired action, such as filling out a form, creating an account or signing up for a newsletter.

Pay-per-click (PPC) or Cost-per-click (CPC):
The business owner pays the affiliate a specified amount of money every time a visitor clicks on the business owner’s advertisement.

Pay-per-call:
A relatively new affiliate program compensation model in which the business owner pays the affiliate a commission for phone calls received from potential prospects as response to a specific advertisement.

Affiliate Marketing Tips - #3: Consider how you're going to get paid in the context of what you need and what is going to work best for you.

Make an informed decision versus simply going with the first company offering an affiliate program for the products or service you want to market. Look around and make sure you have several companies from which to choose. You may even decide you want to go with several companies who offer the same product - meaning, competitors. One way to do this is compare and contrast each company's product on your site.

Now, this next tip is important, but often disregarded or over looked.

Affiliate Marketing Tips - #4: Be smart about where you place affiliate program links on your web site:

If you decide that enrolling as an affiliate in one or more affiliate programs is for you, then consider where you’re going to place your affiliate links on your web site. Why? Because affiliate links work best in the content you put on your site. Meaning, amongst the information you provide to your readers.

For example, let’s imagine that you’re creating a web site that is all about cats. You would look for and find affiliate programs providing cat related products and services.

Let’s imagine that one of the affiliate programs you choose is with a business owner who sells cat toys. You would place the affiliate link leading to cat toys in the content you wrote about how important it is for cats to have toys with which they can play.

The idea is to post quality information on your site and to link to the business owners’ sites via your content.

Why?

Now that’s a good question. The reason is because sites that are made up of primarily affiliate links, with no content for visitors to read, are poorly regarded by search engines. The search engines are designed to find quality information for people who are searching for information about a specific topic.

The algorithms that the various search engine companies write make the search engines ”smart” at spotting web sites that provide poor quality information to information seekers. The goal for search engines is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users.

So, if you’re going to become an affiliate marketer, put those affiliate links within the content of the high quality, valuable information you’re providing to your visitors.

If you want more information about how to do this or need help with any other aspect of your business, contact us – we’re here to help.

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