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- 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 (or were) typically advertising banners that
say "click here"
(for the benefit that is being promoted).
Now more common are text-based hyperlinks that are also used
to
endorse
affiliate company products and services (usually with better
results). And, more and more often, affiliates are using
article
directories, forums, blog posts, and Social Media
participation to
draw readers' awareness to value-adding pages or sites that then lead to an
affiliate link. Affiliate marketing ads also crop up on
search engines, 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 he or she'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 (the affiliate) 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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