An affiliate program is an extremely powerful way of promoting a website. Affiliate programs are based on the concept of pay-for-performance marketing, where you share the revenue with your affiliates.
An affiliate program works like this - other websites or people who own big newsletters or ezines, sign up as your affiliates. The affiliate then promotes your products and services and refers people through to your website using their own website, newsletter or ezine. Every time the affiliate delivers a new sale, lead or extra traffic (depending on the model you use) you pay the affiliate a portion of the new income that is generated.
The strength of affiliate marketing is that it is a win-win relationship. You pay for results. If the affiliate produces no results, you don’t pay. With this type of program, your affiliates provide the marketing and promotion for your website and you provide the goods or services.
Amazon.com has one of the most successful examples of an affiliate program, which they call their associate program, allowing people to link their visitors through to Amazon’s site in return for a commission, if a sale is generated.
Now Amazon.com has well over 500,000 affiliates! That is 500,000 separate websites actively promoting their products! Using this powerful and successful program Amazon.com became a household name in very little time.
You’re probably thinking- “Why doesn’t everyone have an affiliate program?” and “We need to set up our own affiliate program right NOW!”. However, affiliate programs are not guaranteed to succeed because even though they are simple to ‘sell’, they require a lot of planning, hard work and investment, to implement successfully. The Internet is littered with poorly planned and executed affiliate programs.
Affiliate programs require a 100% commitment to ‘doing it right’ for them to be successful.
As a general rule, affiliate programs are best for businesses whose products or services have a broad market.
Merchants that have a strong niche market benefit most from search engine advertising and marketing.
Click here to find out how to plan your Affiliate / Associate Program
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