Affiliate Marketing – How can it help you grow

When growing an online business, the challenge is in your methods to vary the sources of qualified traffic coming to your website.  Both SEO and PPC efforts will do a very good job but like all businesses, building depth in qualified traffic sources will assist in reaching growth targets.

Affiliate marketing is the act of building commercial relationships with other websites who acquire the targeted traffic you would like sent to your website.  If traffic is referred on to your website, you provide the referring website a commission (percentage of the sale). 

This is not simply link building.  The referring website has commercial incentives to forward traffic because they know if sales result, they will get paid.  This is not banner advertising.  Banner advertising is the act of paying for real estate on a website for a limited period of time.  If sales result, no incentives are paid.
 
The strategic approach is very effective for many reasons:

• Helps capture a portion of the target market who did not know you existed.
• Can be far more cost effective than PPC campaigns.  Though PPC’s direct response approach is highly effective if managed properly, some industries are very competitive and therefore expensive in remaining visible in Google.
• Because of the financial incentives involved, placement of your advertisement and/or link is usually not an issue.
• If the traffic sent to your website is in the early stage of the buying process, this visitor type rarely buys the first time they visit.  If the website meets the visitor’s needs, it can take numerous visits before a purchase will be made.   When this visitor returns they come back directly and not through the Affiliate channel, therefore, you will not need to pay out a commission making the cost of customer acquisition from this source very low.
• There are database building opportunities.  If a sale on the first visit is not realistic, then a Plan B should be set up to acquire the visitors name and email address for email marketing purposes.  If the commercials with the referring website are related to sales, then acquiring a name and email address would cost nothing.

The downside to this approach is the time to implement.  There is no fast and easy solution in making this happen.  The process is identifying key websites, and negotiating commercials.

If you need advice on who you should be targeting, talk to some eCommerce specialists.  They will help you out.