1 - WHAT'S AFFILIATE MARKETING ALL ABOUT?
For those who aren't familiar with
the concept, "affiliate marketing (or programs)" is synonymous
with... "associate marketing (or programs)", "reseller
programs", "referral programs", "partnership
programs", "bounty programs", "revenue-sharing
programs", even "ambassador programs"! (Though of course,
there may be other meanings associated with some of these terms, in other
contexts.)
What all of the above labels mean is:
A company has set up an automated way for people who
sign up as affiliates to be paid a set amount to help them promote their
products or services... For each viewing of the company's banner ad, or
each referral that the affiliate sends to the company's website (or, in
some cases, other ordering mechanism). We'll call the people who set up these programs "affiliate
companies".
The huge online U.S.
bookstore, Amazon.com, was the company that first heavily promulgated
affiliate marketing on the internet. (I first encountered affiliate
marketing - though I didn't know it! - in a text link with a line or
two of advertising for Amazon in a friend's email message). And
though this type of marketing is particularly suited to businesses that only
operate online, as Amazon does, it's also become very popular with
businesses that have both an online and a "bricks-and-mortar"
presence.
Any websurfer
has by now seen countless such ads on websites of all types. They are
typically advertising banners that say "click here" (for the benefit that
is being promoted). More and more often, text-based
hyperlinks are also used to endorse affiliate company products and
services (and usually with better results). Affiliate marketing ads crop
up in ezines and email sigfiles, even in print advertising.
...Must be something pretty good about it!
TARGETED MARKETING:
Affiliate marketing is targeted
marketing. For the most part, targeted marketing, or target
marketing, is simply a new
twist on the familiar concept of commission-based marketing. No direct
selling is involved. That is, the affiliate is in the position of
providing the medium (his or her website, usually - or email, or word of
mouth; and there is no reason why traditional media advertising cannot be
employed) via which the affiliate company advertises.
Another way of
looking at it is that the affiliate is selling ad space to the affiliate
company s/he's signed up with. (However, what is usually meant by that is
something different - you can sell ad space in the traditional way
by charging a company a flat rate to put its banner on your site, and no
commission would be involved). It's the company's website that truly
does the selling of the product or service offered. (The affiliate will be
well-advised to do some pre-selling, however, as we will discuss
later in the primer section "How To Get the Most Out of Your
Affiliate Programs".)
Affiliate target marketing is a very inexpensive means for
companies to ensure that their advertising expenditure is only for
"targeted" recipients - they only pay when the customer (or
potential customer) has gone to the trouble to come to them!
If you think of the customary tactics of bricks-and-mortar businesses
and "direct response marketing" (mail-order marketing), you'll
see why affiliate marketing shines...
A typical bricks-and-mortar business relies on word-of-mouth
advertising and perhaps newspaper ads - maybe billboard, magazine, radio,
and TV ads - to gain customers. That kind of advertising is a shot in the
dark - they pay, and hope that a small percentage of those who
read/hear/see their ads will check out their stores. The only targeting
they can do is to choose a billboard's location, a print ad's likely
audience, etc., in the hopes of narrowing down to the people most liable
to be interested in their company.
Direct response marketers have an edge over these businesspeople...
They can pay a mailing list house to supply them with the addresses of
people who have already made responses to similar ads in the past. That's
much better - the target market is narrowed down to more people
more likely to be interested in their ad.
Affiliate marketing allows a merchant to pay only for people who
are definitely doing something wished for (clicking on an internet
link), NOW! This is the epitomy of what targeted marketing is about...
Reaching the right folks, the folks who are all set to buy (and
precisely while they're thinking about it).
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