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Affiliate marketing is the practice of promoting your website
through affiliates. These affiliates could be owners of other
websites or simply internet owners who are desirous to make some
money through the promotion of your products and services.
Basically we have two kinds of affiliate marketing strategies.
There is the one-tier program in which the affiliate is barred
from recruiting sub affiliates and only makes commission from
his personal and direct sales effort. In the two tier program,
or multi tier programs, the affiliate can recruit sub affiliates
and can make commission from the commission from the sales his
sub affiliates generate.
The program works in a simple manner - an interested affiliate
signs up via a web form and then obtains banners or text links
to promote your site. If a buyer clicks a link and follows
through to buy a product or patronize a service, the referrer is
noticed and then compensated accordingly.
Website owners have all to gain if they get involved in
affiliate marketing. First, they can build a formidable and
highly motivated sales force without spending any money. Second,
they are assured that any payment made to the affiliate is
derived from a sale he has made from his promotional effort and
not that of the website owner.
There are two ways to set up an affiliate - you can join an
affiliate program such as Commisison Junction or LinkShare or
get your own proprietary affiliate software. If you intend to
set up an affiliate program, you will need to work out the
programs terms and conditions, affiliate commission and provide
banners or text links that affiliates will display on their
sites to refer visitors to your site.
Some affiliate networks worth looking into include:
Affiliate Fuel - http://www.affiliatefuel.com ClickXchange.com -
http://clickxchange.com Commisison Junction -
http://www.commissionjunction.com Cyberbounty -
http://www.cyberbounty.com Leadhound - http://www.leadhound.com/
LinkShare - http://www.linkshare.com Performics -
http://www.performics.com Shareasale.com -
http://www.shareasale.com TradeDoubler -
http://www.tradedoubler.com Websponsors -
http://www.websponsors.com/ etc.
If you intend to set up your own affiliate program, you may have
to ensure that your affiliates are highly motivated. Research
has shown that affiliates have one thing to fear when it comes
to such issues - affiliate link hijacking. Affiliate link
hijacking is the unethical practice of someone replacing his
link with that of another so that the perpetrator gets the sale
instead of the real owner of the refer ID. You can overcome this
bad practice by masking the URL so that it does not show in the
browser, hiding the page source or using a zero-frame to hide
the affiliate URL.
Lastly, you should be very carefully about affiliates who will
spam in order to push sales through. Sometimes through over
enthusiasm an affiliate can apply unscrupulous means to generate
sales or promote the products. If such a thing happens and
spamming is detected, the search engines scan ban your site and
thus endanger you total SEO efforts.
Affiliate marketing can help you generate a large sale force in
no time and help reduce your website promotion costs. However
like any commercial endeavor, people will try to cheat and
endanger your reputation so look out and stamp out these acts
before they stamp you out.
Good luck with your website, Reginald
About the author:
Reginald
Copyright 2005 LookForLinks.com - the ultimate relevant
reciprocal links exchange manager. Feel free to redistribute
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