Affiliate Programmes

Affiliate marketing consists of connecting customers with merchants. A merchant offers a commission for each product or in some cases and action that you provide. In essence you are selling a product without the hassle of customer service and fulfillment responsibilities. One of the downsides of an e-commerce model is the overhead required to ship the product and deal with the recipients of that product. Delays or lost packages cut into your bottom line and add an extra layer of complexity and unknown into your business.

This is where affiliate marketing becomes a more attractive choice to many entrepreneurs. Your task is to generate traffic and in many cases pre-sell this traffic so that it has a higher rate of conversion when reaching the merchants own site or landing page.

If one has good SEO or PPC skills then the ROI on the expenditure required to gain the traffic can be quite profitable. Although many SEO and PPC specialists might work on consulting for a 3rd party, many of them use their skills to generate profit directly on their own. Due to the lower overhead compared to running a full business one can divert time across multiple niches and therefor multiple income streams.

So what are the types of methods for promoting an affiliate merchants product?

One of the popular ways to promote affiliate products is through the use of ‘review’ sites. These are usually presented as unbiased reviews on either the single product on offer or additional products for comparison. An affiliate might even promote all of the products in the review although in many cases higher ‘scores’ are given for the most profitable items. A good affiliate will try to add value to purchasing process while poorer affiliates will simple copy and paste the merchants ad copy or other affiliates work without adding any value at all.

Google in general frowns on the latter as these types of sites just clog up the web due to their redundant nature. Recently Google has been seen to be more aggressive with review sites in particular when assigning quality scores to the affiliates Adwords campaigns.

Speaking of Adwords, pay per click is another method that is popular to promote affiliate products. In the past direct linking was a popular way to send traffic directly from your Adwords ad to the merchants landing page. Over time Google have placed more emphasis on quality score which in some cases can lead to higher cost per click if the landing page is not deemed relevant or of a high enough quality based of off Google guidelines. Since you don’t control what the merchants landing page looks like you don’t have any way to improve a low quality score if that becomes the case in your Adwords campaign. Secondly only one ad may contain the same url at one time so the option to direct link is not always possible if there are other affiliates going after the same url.

Direct linking is a good way to test a campaign before putting in the time in making your own pages on either a hosted domain or on for instance a Web 2.0 property. But once an offer looks to be converting well enough then the next step can be to create your own page with the previously mentioned options. A good tactic is to pre-sell or warm up a prospect so that they are more inclinded to purchase once at the merchants landing page. Another advantage of having your own intermediate page is the opportunity to collect emails for a list for future marketing efforts. This allows you to leverage the traffic being driven in for the current campaign to be used at a later date.

Some ways to create value for your visitors is to offer info additional to what the merchant has already provided on their own pages. You can include advice, tips, and bonus materials to use with the product itself. These types of things will separate you from other affiliates promoting the offer and can lead to more sales through your affiliate link and not theirs. Having a more content rich site can also improve your Adwords quality score which in turn lowers your cost per click which has the result of producing more profit for your advertising spend.