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Making_Money_with_Affiliate_Programs_ _Part_I
| Making Money with Affiliate Programs - Part I
If you have a website and you are not involved in any of the
thousands of affiliate programs available on the Internet, you
are loosing great opportunities to make some extra income. As in
the case of some top affiliate marketers this extra income might
even transform into thousands of dollars. Affiliate program is
one of the most effective methods of producing sales second only
to direct mail. According to Forrester Research, a marketing
research company, in this year 21% of all online sales will be
generated from affiliate sites promoting affiliate products.
If you do your homework right, you too can earn handsomely from
the correct use of affiliate programs.
What is an affiliate program?
The concept of affiliate program is based on the age-old
business practice of referral service. This is quite common in
many industries. An attorney, for example, gets a certain
percent of commission if he refers a client to another lawyer.
Back in 1996 Amazon.com started the first widespread use of
referral service on the Internet. If a client comes to
Amazon.com and buy a product using a link provided by Amazon,
from a website which signed affiliate partnership agreement,
that site receives 10 to 15% commission from the sale. The
Amazon Affiliate Program became so successful that it prompted
others to follow the suit. Today, affiliate programs became
ubiquitous on the Internet making them one of the primary
methods of online marketing of products and services.
Affiliate Program can be defined as Internet marketing system
where a company allows and helps third party websites, called
affiliates to post link and refer clients in return for a
predetermined flat-fee or percentage-based commission.
Benefits of affiliate programs
Affiliate Programs became so popular because as a partnership
it’s a win-win situation for both the program owner and the
affiliates.
Benefits for program owners include:
Increase Sales The primary reason for most of the companies to
adopt an affiliate program is the possibility of boosting sales.
In fact, proper implementation of a quality affiliate program is
capable of increasing sales dramatically.
Free promotion A successful affiliate program can easily become
the largest traffic generator for the company website. Many
websites receive major portion of their visitors from their
affiliate links. To find suitable websites with required content
in order to run a banner or link campaign is time consuming and
require large resources; affiliate programs in comparison can
resolve this issue often with a far smaller investment.
Increase search engine ranking Search engines, Google in
particular, calculate link popularity as one of the main factors
in their ranking algorithm. Backward links from affiliate sites
certainly help improving this.
Branding Thanks to its affiliate program Amazon.com banner links
can be seen on numerous websites. Popularity of Amazon.com among
the newcomers to Internet proves that Amazon.com was successful
in creating its online brand name. No doubt, omnipresent
visibility of their logo on the affiliate sites definitely had a
huge impact on the brand recognition of the Amazon. Offline
companies had to spend billions of dollars of advertisement
money to get similar results!
How about the affiliates? What are the benefits they get from an
affiliate relationship?
No product or service to carry Online business with your own
product or service might be rewarding, but it requires
substantial investment from your part. With carefully chosen
affiliate programs you can have your online business without the
requirement of having your own products.
The investment is low as all you need is a website.
No need to have a merchant account Since you don’t carry your
own products or services you do not have to go through the
hassle of having a merchant account to cater your clients. Your
affiliate program owner will do everything. All you have to do
is supply clients through your designated link.
Possibility of residual income Many programs pay you a
commission from the sales made to the customers generated from
affiliates, who have signed up as an affiliate following your
link. This kind of affiliate system is called 2-tier system.
Visitor tracking system allows affiliate programs to pay you a
commission when same visitor from your website makes repeat
purchase.
Some affiliate programs that promote monthly or yearly
subscription services pay a commission each month as long as
customer referred by you stays subscribed.
Complement you website with added products and services If your
site is dedicated to certain products or services, there must be
other stuffs that go well together with your own products. It’s
a good idea to seek out viable affiliate products of these items
and promote through your site. Your visitors will love this and
this will help building loyalty among your visitors.
Have new contents for your site many affiliate programs supply
you with valuable marketing materials. Some of these materials
can be nice addition to your site content bringing further value
to your website.
Various Affiliate programs
There are two ways of running an affiliate program: The company
owns and handles the program itself, using certain software.
The company uses third party administered affiliate programs.
The reasons why many companies prefer to hand over management of
their affiliate programs include technical aspects, cost factor
and human factors.
– Companies do not have to spend money on developing, running
and updating the software. – Proven technology allows companies
to concentrate on their job of selling their products and
services. – Many prospective affiliates prefer third party
managed programs, because they rightfully ponder, in this case
the program owners have less chance to cheat their affiliates.
Find below a list of some leading third party affiliate program
administrators:
http://www.befree.com http://www.linkshare.com http://www.cj.com
http://www.clickbank.com
However, this does not mean that you should avoid company run
affiliate programs. On the contrary, some of the most successful
and best affiliate programs are run by the owners.
If you find an affiliate program that suits your requirement and
you feel that the company is a reputable one, by any means you
should give it a try!
About the author:
Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO
of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide
experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web
Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to
start and run online business. You can contact him at
mailto:nowshaderusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com,
http://www.rusbiz.com
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