last time we talk about Internet marketing. A basic medium for meeting peoples unlimited wants in our mordern world. Internet marketing cannot be complete without talking affiliate marketing. And so today i want to take you on:
AFFILIATE MARKETING AND ITS TOOLS
At its most basic Affiliate Marketing is simply the establishment of a relationship between two or more website owners for their mutual financial benefit.
The majority of websites are established to promote products or a service of some kind, yet they are little use if no-one knows about their existence. A website operator may decide to leave the generation of visitor traffic to his site to the various search engines. However, most search engines work by simply taking account of the number of other sites linking to yours as a measure of your popularity. Affiliate Marketing is a way to take advantage of this fact to generate revenue, not only for you through your own site, but also for those sites that point visitors in your direction.
For most of the 20th Century, the traditional sales and marketing model was predicated on spreading your message as far and wide as possible. Traditionally, this was done through media advertising, direct marketing to potential customers and the use of sales teams, both direct and indirect. In many ways, Affiliate Marketing takes this model and applies it to the Internet - with one crucial difference. In traditional marketing, the message is spread hoping that it will reach prospective customers - an outward-bound style of marketing; with Affiliate Marketing, the potential customers are drawn towards the product information - an inward-bound marketing model that is far more effective.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, the message was spread through mutual link exchanges. A simple mechanism where one website would exchange a link with another on the basis of "I'll tell my visitors about your website, if you tell yours about mine." However this was little more than a "hand-shake" type arrangement with no incentive for links to be promoted and no financial benefits attached. Affiliate Marketing takes that concept and expands it.
Assume that you have a store selling a popular commodity item such as books. While you want people to come to your bookstore, it would also be a good revenue generator if people purchased books through your website, saving you overhead and enabling you to order books from the distributors as they are purchased, cutting inventory and reducing risk. So how do you get people to come to your website to buy the books they are interested in?
Offer to pay anyone who sends a visitor from their website to yours a small percentage of any resulting sales;
The owners of that website now have both a benefit from the link and an incentive to promote your store. You can almost guarantee that your link will go from being buried on the "Links" page to being on the front page of their site. They will also spread the word among people of the same interests, and before long you have more people supplying revenue generating links to your site. The link exchange has now become "Look at this cool site and these cool products - Go visit it."
Now you have an Affiliate Marketing program in place. Next we step on below;
Affiliate Marketing
A producer (X) establishes a relationship with another website owner or publisher (Y) wherein he provides a financial benefit for Y to direct visitors to X's web-site.
Of course, the more associate publishers that content producer signs up, the broader his reach and the more revenue will be generated.
Affiliate Network
A collection of similarly-themed affiliate programs collected and offered as a single package to potential affiliates.
Blog
Short for Web log. An online journal.
Click-Through
The action taken by a web user when they click on a link and arrive at a pre-defined target web page.
Content Producer
The person responsible for generating the content on a website that includes an affiliate link.
Content Sites
Websites that provide a lot of information and act as a knowledge resource for a particular group that may be a potential target audience for your affiliate marketing program.
Cookie
A snippet of text sent by a server to the user's web browser that is then communicated back each time the browser accesses that same server.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
The amount an affiliate gets paid every time a visitor referred from an affiliate makes a purchase.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
The commission structure where an affiliate is paid an agreed amount when a visitor clicks through from the affiliate's website to the merchant's site, even if no further action is taken.
Cost Per Lead (CPL)
The commission structure where an affiliate is paid an agreed amount each time a referred visitor fills in a form to capture personal contact information.
Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM)
Agreement where the affiliate is paid a set amount for the display of one thousand advertisements or banners, regardless if anyone clicks on them or if the ad results in a sale.
Landing Page
The page on a target website that a customer arrives at after clicking an affiliate link, e.g. a specific product page.
Link Exchanges
A simple mechanism where one website would exchange a link with another.
Rich Media
Media that gives the viewer an enhanced experience over that traditionally found in print. This can range from simple animated graphics, to full audio visual productions and downloads.
RSS Feeds
A mechanism to syndicate content from an originating site out to many different locations.
Tracking Pixel
An image tag for a 1x1 pixel that is placed on a page where the desired action (such as a purchase) has been completed.
Tracking Software
Software employed to collect information on the way a user moves around and between websites.
Viral Marketing
A way of spreading a marketing message indirectly through "word of mouth" and referrals.
Affiliate explained;
Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketer's efforts. Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.
Affiliate History:
The concept of revenue sharing—paying commission for referred business—predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web in November 1994.
During November 1994, CDNOW launched its BuyWeb program. With this program CDNOW was the first non-adult website to introduce the concept of an affiliate or associate program with its idea of click-through purchasing. CDNOW had the idea that music-oriented websites could review or list albums on their pages that their visitors may be interested in purchasing. These websites could also offer a link that would take the visitor directly to CDNOW to purchase the albums. The idea for remote purchasing originally arose because of conversations with music label Geffen Records in the fall of 1994. The management at Geffen wanted to sell its artists' CDs directly from its website, but did not want to implement this capability itself. Geffen asked CDNOW if it could design a program where CDNOW would handle the order fulfillment. Geffen realized that CDNOW could link directly from the artist on its website to Geffen's website, bypassing the CDNOW home page and going directly to an artist's music page.
Amazon.com (Amazon) launched its associate program in July 1996. Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page. When visitors clicked from the associate's website through to Amazon and purchased a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon was not the first merchant to offer an affiliate program, but its program was the first to become widely-known and serve as a model for subsequent programs. In February 2000, Amazon announced that it had been granted a patent (6,029,141) on all the essential components of an affiliate program. The patent application was submitted in June 1997, which predates most affiliate programs, but not PC Flowers & Gifts.com (October 1994), AutoWeb.com (October 1995), Kbkids.com/BrainPlay.com (January 1996), EPage (April 1996), and several others.
Historic development ;
Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the Internet, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business. According to one report, the total sales amount generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the United Kingdom alone. The estimates were £1.35 billion in sales in 2005. Marketing Sherpa's research team estimated that, in 2006, affiliates worldwide earned US$6.5 billion in bounty and commissions from a variety of sources in retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, and forms of lead generation other than contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense. Currently the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling, and retail industries. The three sectors expected to experience the greatest growth are the mobile phone, finance, and travel sectors. Soon after these sectors came the entertainment (particularly gaming) and Internet-related services (particularly broadband) sectors. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from business-to-business marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as part of their mix.
Locating affiliate programs;
There are three primary ways to locate affiliate programs for a target website: affiliate programs directories,
large affiliate networks that provide the platform for dozens or even hundreds of advertisers, and the target website itself. (Websites that offer an affiliate program often have a link titled "affiliate program", "affiliates", "referral program", or "webmasters"—usually in the footer or "About" section of the website.) If the above locations do not yield information pertaining to affiliates, it may be the case that there exists a non-public affiliate program. The most definitive method for finding this information is to contact the website owner directly.
Affiliate marketing is a large topic to be treated with care and time. Time is a factor, got to go do something else now. Until i come your way again stay bless. And remember its all about working smart not working too hard. Good Bye.
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