Using Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a technique that allows a website to generate traffic
from adverts or text links placed on other websites (often referred to as the
affiliate or publisher). Payment for this traffic is made on a performance
basis, by the website owner either paying the publisher a set fee for visits
generated by the adverts (click throughs) and/or a percentage of revenue for
sales produced (conversions).

A successful affiliate campaign can provide considerable benefits for an
advertiser, such as:

• you pay only for results achieved, so that increased sales can be
  generated for a marginal cost
• the publisher takes responsibility for setting up and running adverts
• you can potentially establish a wide network of affiliate partners driving
  significant traffic volumes to your website
• affiliate spending can be easily controlled and monitored, leading to a
  high level of accountability
• promotions and branding can be integrated with other marketing activities.

An affiliate campaign can be set up directly with partner sites, although the
tracking and reporting software needs to be in place and contact made with
possible partner sites. The easier route that many advertisers will follow is to
sign up with affiliate management companies like href=”http://www.tradedoubler.com” target=”_blank”>Trade Doubler, href=”http://www.cj.com” target=”_blank”>Commission Junction and href=”http://www.ukaffiliates.com/” target=”_blank”>UK Affiliates. These have
a large network of affiliates in place, both in the UK and overseas, plus they
will handle the administration, such as payments and communications, plus the
advertiser can control their campaigns online in return for a set-up charge and
monthly management fee.

Like any online marketing activity, the campaign needs to be effective and
the upfront costs can be a barrier before results are achieved. However, many
financial services, retail and other B2C websites gain good additional business
from affiliate marketing, due to their volumes of traffic, sales margins and
their ability to provide special offers to web users clicking on their
adverts.

A successful affiliate program requires intensive management. One difficulty
lies in attracting high quality publishers that can generate good traffic for
you, so that fostering a close relationship with your best publishers and
providing them with incentives is one key to success, as publishers can lose
interest quickly if they do not initially see good results.

Finally, there is also some confusion about the added value that a link from
an affiliate advert can give to your link popularity and therefore its benefits
to search rankings. Such a link will usually be dynamically generated and pass
through a tracking program and as such will not be recognised by search engines
as a link to your website.

If you would like to know more about how affiliate marketing could benefit
your website, contact us now for our advice.

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