Promoting Your Business with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the type of marketing where an advertiser would pay commission to the affiliate for generating conversions for them. A conversion is a goal set by the advertiser. When a person visits a website and they buy or sign-up for something, a goal or conversion has occurred.

Many would assume that a sale would be the only goal for an advertiser, but that’s not always the case. Some advertisers don’t sell products or services. Instead, they may make their money from email marketing or from ad revenue. So, a conversion is really defined by what the advertiser wants to achieve.

Conversions can be a…

• Sale
• Lead
• Signup
• Download
• Ad click

What is an Affiliate?

An affiliate is an individual or company that the advertiser has approved to promote their website, product or service on their behalf. In return, the advertiser pays the affiliate a commission every time a conversion is generated as a result of their referral.

Is Affiliate Marketing right for your business?

It depends. Like any other type of marketing, it all comes down to the profit. Affiliate marketing requires testing and fine-tuning to get the results you want. It involves setting the right parameters for your campaign, as well as finding the right affiliates to promote your products. By optimizing your affiliate marketing campaign over time, you’ll be able find that sweet spot where you can maximize ROI.

Ecommerce sites represent the bulk of the advertisers that promote their sites through affiliate marketing. However, there are a handful of advertisers that don’t sell anything from their site, and advertise primarily for traffic or signups.

If you sell products or services from your website, you should consider affiliate marketing as an option to increase sales. If you don’t sell anything and your site is used mainly for informational purposes, then you may want to try out some other types of marketing before you consider this one.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Probably the biggest reason why advertisers love to promote their products through affiliate marketing is because they only pay a commission when a conversion occurs. This minimizes wasteful spending on advertising and maximizes your ROI. Also, with affiliate marketing, most of the heavy lifting is done by the affiliates.

How to find Affiliates to promote your website

There are two ways to get the word out about your affiliate program. One, through an affiliate network, or two, by implementing an affiliate program on your site. Although, running your own affiliate program may save money, there are some major advantages to working through an affiliate network. An affiliate network immediately gives you access to thousands of qualified affiliates who can promote your product or service. Also, an affiliate network offers higher levels of security by pre-screening affiliates, and by filtering out fraudulent transactions and traffic. The downside to an affiliate network would be the costs involved in setting up and running a campaign.