Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Source: Wikipedia
Affiliate Marketing tips, tools, companies, and more
There are 2 different types of affiliate networks, CPS (Cost Per Sale) and CPA (Cost Per Action). CPS networks typically pay a commission that is a percentage of the sale amount. CPA networks typically pay a fixed commission for each offer. I primarily work with CPA networks but have been doing more with CPS or revenue sharing types of programs recently.
There is a lot of terminology to understand so here are a few important terms and how they are calculated.
A convervsion means that a customer has purchased the product or service offered, submitted the requested information, or performed the desired action, like downloading a software application.
A commission is the amount earned for each conversion.
Conversion Rate(CR) is calculated by taking the number of times an offer converts and dividing it by the number of times it was clicked. CR = Conversions / Clicks
Earnings Per Click(EPC) is derived by dividing the commission earned by the number of clicks. You can think of it as CR expressed as a monetary amount. Both EPC and CR are a metric to gauge how well an offer is performing. In some cases EPC is expressed as earnings per thousand clicks.
Affiliate Marketing Companies
Tools
Buy a domain name and setup hosting at NameCheap
Setup a free website at Weebly or Wix
Track your traffic with Voluum, AdsBridge, or another service
Improve your SEO with a Free Search Engine Submit
Learn How to Market Successfully
There are lots of people out there who offer information about affiliate marketing, but some of them are not so reputable. Here are some good sources of information.
OutSourcing
You can’t do it all yourself so somethings you need to outsource. Here are some places were you can find help:
I hope this helps!
Bill York