Thursday, November 5, 2009

Affiliate Programs Explained

By Justin Harrison

You've probably heard of affiliate marketing before, although maybe not by that name. It's also known as a partner, sponsor, or associate marketing. If you've never made use of affiliate marketing, but you have a business to run... well, now's the time to get cracking. You're missing out on a new breed of marketing that is changing the landscape of business forever.

In a general sense, these programs allow you to use any online advertising medium to share revenue with an affiliate merchant website, by receiving a portion of their income for delivering customers who result in sales, leads or traffic to the affiliate merchant website. The popularity of affiliate marketing is very well realized now than earlier. This is prominent among the reasons for the high visibility of affiliate marketing programs among the ever growing number of affiliate marketers on a daily basis.

Latest web technology has enabled the affiliate marketers to get their statistics and income figures the moment they make an affiliate sale. It is now possible to use companies like PayPal for payment and receipt processing.

This has highly curtailed the time that an affiliate marketer needs to wait for his payments to be collected from the merchants. Today, both the merchants and the affiliates can see clearly that affiliate marketing can work for both of them. The merchant sees affiliate marketing today as the chance to advertise their products at a lower cost. The affiliates, on the other hand, sees affiliate marketing as an easy way of earning profits online by doing what they like most, and that is by creating websites.

Before we had the net, affiliate marketing was clunky and difficult to use effectively. But now, with online systems of connecting businesses, managing money, and displaying ads, affiliate marketing has really come into its own as a force to be reckoned with. No more is affiliate marketing a second-class marketing technique. In fact, it has become quite possibly the most profitable form of marketing to date, given the minimal expenses and trouble involved.

How do you know what type of affiliate program will work best for you? Are all of these marketing programs the same or are there programs that operate better than others? Do they all offer the same advantages and benefits?

As with all areas of marketing there are several degrees of differences between affiliate programs. Finding what works best for you of course, depends on what kind of customer base you deal with. Another factor in determining how profitable it may be for you is to look at how much traffic or exposure your own website has. Obviously site with high traffic will generate more customers in an affiliate program than one that does not. In addition the programs themselves vary on methods of payment. There are three general categories affiliate programs use to generate income. There is the pay-per-click method (PPC), the pay-per-play method (PPP) and pay-per-performance method (PPP). Knowing your client base will greatly help you in determining which of these would work best for your site.

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1 comment:

best affiliates said...

Hi! You have a nice site, very informative.
If you don’t mind can you suggest some sites you know that have the same subject as yours?