Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing Business Models

  E. You're Not Alone -- The Affiliate Marketing Team 

• The affiliate (that's you) connects potential buyers with the product -- basically absorbing "customer acquisition costs" for the merchant -- in return for a commission.  
• The merchant is always owner or licenser of the product or service. Good merchants supply an easy-to-navigate website, a working sales process, and both customer and affiliate support.  
• The affiliate manager's job is to make sure that affiliate sales are properly tracked, that all affiliates abide by the program's rules, and that affiliates are supported and paid promptly. When a program has a dedicated affliate manager, that's a good sign.  
• The affiliate agreement is a legal contract between the merchant and you. The legal language may be boring, but read it anyway -- it's important.  
• Sometimes merchants use affiliate networks to help them run their program. An affiliate network is a third-party service that may represent hundreds, even thousands of merchants. You'll find many advantages to using networks, particulary the browsing through lots of programs through one interface.  
• Website visitors are called "traffic." Attracting the right kind of traffic will be one of the most important skills you will learn as an affiliate.  

F. The Basic Affiliate Business Models   

• Your business model is important, because it will determine what you spend your time doing each day.  
• The four basic business models are Search Engine Marketing, Email, Content, and Community.  
• Search Engine Marketing covers two types - paid search and natural search.  
• • Paid search involves buying, writing, and tracking ads on search engines, such as Google AdWords.  
  • Natural search involves learning search engine optimization (SEO), a process of acquiring relevant incoming links and making sure your website code allows search engines to find your site for keywords.  
• Email affiliates build opt-in lists, send offers for affiliate products, and work hard to make sure their mailing lists are clean and compliant with spam legislation.  

• Content affiliates develop websites that provide free information, write and create content for them, and use keywords, article syndication, and other similar methods to get traffic.  
• Community affiliates interact with groups of other users online through forums, blogs, and Web 2.0 networks and communities.  
• Business models are flexible, and in practice you will often combine aspects of several.  

G. Putting It All Together   

• The first thing you'll do is sign up for an affiliate program when you decide on the products you'd like to promote. The merchant will then send your special affiliate links.  
• Next, you build you affiliate website, populate it with your affiliate links, and get visitors.  
• Build a list of e-mail subscribers (opt-ins) to regularly send a newsletter containing additional products.
• Those visitors will click through to the merchant's website using your affiliate links.  
• When your visitors make a purchase on the merchant site, you'll earn commissions..  

 NEXT>>>PAGE 4 Affiliate Marketing Terms 

1. Affiliate Marketing
2. Affiliate Marketing Concepts
3. Affiliate Marketing Business Models
4. Affiliate Marketing Terms