Affiliate Marketing a Win-Win Deal!
The information highway is long and winding, with heavy traffic and millions of stops along the way. It can be easy for your business to get lost in the shuffle. Affiliate marketing can help your business stand out in the crowd.
Think of affiliate marketing as signposts on the information highway that alert web customers to your business and help steer them to your site. Simply put affiliate marketing uses websites to drive online traffic to other sites. This online marketing tool began only a few years after the introduction of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. It also overlaps with other Internet marketing methods, including search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, blogging, and search engine marketing. In short, affiliate marketing is an integral part of any comprehensive online marketing campaign.
Online retailer Amazon.com is the best example of the successful use of affiliate marketing. Although it was not the first website to make use of this tool, Amazon’s associate’s program, launched in 1996, became a model for later affiliate marketing programs. Under Amazon’s associate’s program, associate’s can place banners and text links on their websites for individual items. Clicking the link on an associate’s website takes you straight to Amazon’s website, where you can view and purchase the item in which you are interested. The associate receives a commission from the sale.
Affiliate marketing is a win-win deal for affiliates and retailers alike. The affiliates benefit from the money they receive through commissions on sales by the retailers to which the affiliates’ sites steer Internet traffic. In addition to the revenue from commissions, an affiliate marketing program gives an affiliate’s website greater exposure. Commissions – also known as revenue sharing – is the most common form of compensation in affiliate marketing, though other forms exist, including cost per action (CPA) and cost per click (CPC).
For non-profit organizations, acting as an affiliate provides a means for the organization to generate additional revenue. There is virtually no limit to the kind of website that can be an affiliate and benefit from affiliate marketing.
The benefit for retailers is having another advertising tool for their businesses, and the goods and services they offer. A customer who links to a retailer from an affiliate’s site may become a return customer, who comes back to that retailer’s site again and again for future purchases.
The popularity of affiliate marketing has grown over the years. In the United States, affiliate marketing generated more than $6 billion in sales in a single year. In the United Kingdom, affiliate networks accounted for £2.16 billion in sales in 2006, up from £1.35 billion a year earlier, according to the Internet Statistics Compendium.
Historically, the top sectors for affiliate marketing have been the retail, gambling, and adult entertainment sectors. However, the greatest growth in affiliate marketing is forecast for the finance, travel, and mobile communications sectors.
The online marketplace is as congested as ever. Let affiliate marketing place a few billboards out there for your business!
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Filed under: Affiliate Marketing
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