Affiliate Marketing - Should you be considering it?

Affiliate Marketing - Should you be considering it? (0)

| 1/08/2008

Wiliam is always looking for strategies to drive more relevant traffic to your site. Have you considered using affiliate or referral programs to drive conversions?

Affiliate marketing and referral programs put your link in front of people who are surfing related sites. Basically, using one website to drive traffic to another. It’s a successful, if low-key, form of online marketing that is often underutilized. It plays significant role in many e-retailers' marketing strategies.

Recently, Google bought the companyPerformics, which provides affiliate marketing as well as other traffic enhancing services tailored especially for multichannel marketing, meaning brands that exist both as ecommerce and retail stores. These campaigns are critical, because customers spend up to 30% more per purchase from multichannels. Google also has a highly popular affiliate marketing service available for almost any kind of website that you could publish.

One of the differences between this kind of affiliate marketing and traditional advertising is that you only pay if you make a sale. Can you imagine if this were true when renting billboard space? Most affiliate programs use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) model that compensates the affiliates based on a certain percentage of sales revenues. Other methods of calculating payment are cost per action (CPA and cost per click (CPC). With costs tied to success, an affiliate program can be a powerful marketing tool for traffic and conversions.

tags: Web 2.0 ,  Web Strategy ,  Online Marketing ,  SEM ,  Search