Affiliate Marketing Schemes

From a merchant’s perspective, affiliate marketing helps increase the amount of traffic that is directed to their sites, whilst for the customer it helps them find relevant and high quality products more easily.

Affiliate marketing works when both parties work together towards a common end. It benefits affiliates as it can provide an additional source of revenue, whilst for the merchant it can be a cost effective way of increasing leads/sales.

Affiliates however, must be careful about the products they are promoting because low quality products can damage their reputation both as an affiliate and a business.

There are a wide range of affiliate schemes to choose from.  The most important thing is selecting the one which is relevant to your website, to ensure you are targeting the right audience.

Just to demonstrate this point I will now talk to you about 3 completely different industries where affiliate marketing has been employed by merchants to increase traffic to their site and ultimately increase revenues. The three industries are: Tourism, Home Improvement and Digital Agencies.

In general terms, there are three ways to make money through affiliate marketing and they are:

Pay-Per Click: This method works in a similar way to the methodology applied by most search engines.  Affiliates get paid a fee every time a visitor on their site leaves by clicking on a link leading to the merchant’s website.  The commission is usually the lowest for this type. However, getting lots of visitors without any confirmed sales might be costly for merchants.

Pay-Per-Lead: The affiliate gets paid a set fee every time a visitor registers at the merchant’s website as a result of an advertisement on the affiliate website.

For example, if you have affiliate website advertising a hotel you will get paid when the merchant gets an enquiry through the advertisement on your website even though the visitor changes his mind about staying there.

Pay-Per-Sale – The affiliate is paid a fee every time a sale by the merchant is made as a result of the affiliate`s marketing effort. It is risk free as merchants only have to pay if there is a confirmed sale. The down side is that the commission which the merchant has to pay is generally considerably higher than the other types of affiliate marketing models.  However, the fee is often correlates to the sale price.

For example, if you have an affiliate scheme set up around the sale of home interior items such as blinds, the affiliate will receive a percentage of the total value of any sale made as a result of their marketing efforts.

From a digital perspective, affiliate marketing is a marketing practice whereby a third party promotes another online business in return receiving a reward for every visitor or sale which is completed as a result of that affiliate`s own marketing efforts.

There are four key players;

Affiliate: A publisher who advertises the products or services sold by the merchant.

Merchant: A company who sells the product or service that is being advertised.

Affiliate network:  It acts as a middleman between affiliates and merchants.

Customer: The one is willing to buy the product or service.

Affiliates refer potential customers to a given merchant’s website through online advertising, emails and or online links in return for a commission based generally on leads or sales.

Well, welcome to my blog about affiliate marketing. Here you will find useful information and advice about all things affiliate – basically, think of me as your one-stop-shop for all your affiliate marketing needs!!

I will start off by focusing on the general idea of affiliate marketing and then look at more specific examples in the tourism, home improvement and digital agency industries.

A bit of a broad scope, however, I like working on and providing diversity in my work! If you have any questions, would like me to cover anything in particular in my blog or have any advertising queries then don’t hesitate to contact me.

Hope you enjoy and learn something