What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing where one business rewards another for traffic, customers, or leads. The affiliate is the seller of your product or service. You pay out to that affiliate based upon your deal (CPC, $X/lead, cos-per-million impressions, etc.)

Affiliate, with all its nuances, is far, far, too complex to go into here. However, some basic conclusions can be made. For one, it allows your business to get into niche areas of the internet where you may not be able to penetrate otherwise, and if that’s where your customer is, you must go. Two, affiliates sometimes focus on actually branding you, perhaps getting articles published about you, quite outside the realm of basic PPC. Three, affiliate marketing can offer exceptionally qualified leads, with the affiliate doing the qualifying themselves.

[insert image of affiliate triad here with fourth player on the outside.]

Pitfalls of affiliate marketing.

If you don’t have budgeting experience, no matter how easy the affiliate or CPC company says it is to control, do your homework before jumping in. Also remember that tracking the progress of that affiliate is absolutely critical if you are to budget correctly. If you cannot, unequivacally state that this PPC or affiliate campaign made you X amount of money, you should stop and call us right away.

What strategies affiliate marketing is used for.

• Helps you get noticed: Affiliate marketing: Piggyback onto existing marketing channels. Highly contested, always controversial, affiliate marketing can be expensive if you don’t know what your doing. Using the power of existing developed markets by affiliate companies, you ride their media channel wave, reaching the your target customers wherever they go – online, or offline.
• Helps you drive traffic: And sometimes very qualified traffic. It is in the best interest of the affiliate that they back a horse (that’s you) that can win. Sometimes they help you outside of simple traffic; sometimes they’ll even write articles for you.
• Helps you build trust: Use the brand of others to build trust. ‘Trusted network’ affiliate marketing is a ‘piggyback’ method of building trust. If the affiliate lets you use them, then their trust is added to yours (the percentage of transferral based upon how well known the affiliate is.)
• Helps you build referrals: Use channels to target certain traffic. If your target customers  use particular services, those services probably have affiliate marketing programs. Google AdWords alone has an affiliate program, where any website can run ‘Ads by Goooogle.’ Your ads are pushed to these affiliate sites based upon the correlation between your ad and the content of the page (relevance). That’s why we say that it builds referrals; you’re spread out so wide on the web that some people it gets in front of will be ‘lock and key’ fits with your product or service. For very low cost it can pick the cherry leads, wherever they are. PPC: Pay-per-click can be niche targeted for effectiveness. Many PPC programs can be targeted to specific geographic locations (”I am a psychotherapist in the Los Angeles county region”) and only for certain ‘trigger’ words (”family counseling”) – making PPC a great bang for the buck.

Resources

Read more on affiliate marketing’s meta-tactic, paid search. Continue onto PPC.