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Affiliate Marketing
by: Bhavani Vijay
Affiliate program is nothing but you hearten other webmasters to sign up
and advertise your services and products on their sites, in exchange you
pay them based on their performance. An affiliate program is an excellent
way to gain additional sales. There are options for all budgets, but you
generally get what you pay for.
There are various way that affiliates are paid:
1. Per Impression: The affiliate is paid a set amount for every time that
your ad is shown. The downside is that affiliates have no incentive to send
you traffic, or to put your ad in a attention-grabbing location.
2. Per Click: You pay a set amount for each unique person that clicks on
your ad. This is similar to a PPC engine. The downside is that you must pay
even if the traffic is of a low quality.
3. Per Lead: You pay your affiliates based on the number of unique people
that click on your ad, and then proceed to complete a particular action (for
example, a "lead" might be when someone downloads a trial, or signs up for
a mailing list). This is very similar to Per Sale, but is more common on
sites promoting free services .
4. Per Sale: The affiliates are remunerated either a percentage or a set
amount for each sale generated by a user that originated from the affiliate's
site(for example I came across a template selling site named
templatemuseum.com which
offers a high rate of Per sale commission).
Affiliates generally prefer receiving commissions on a Per Impression or
Per Click basis, but site owners have a preference of the inevitability of
Per Lead and Per Sale.
There are three ways to start an affiliate program: Your own script, install
a script, or use a third-party service.
Your Own script
If your website's order system has been custom-made, then one option may
be to ask your programmer to add an affiliate program to the system. The
programmer would add some code to the payment script, and then develop a
simple interface for affiliates to see how they're doing, and for you to
check on your affiliates.
This is an cost-effective choice for sites based on custom scripting, but
site owners may be somnolent to trust your reporting (after all, it would
be in your best interest to fudge the numbers). Established sites can get
away with this, but new websites may have difficulty here. Also, if you roll
your own then it will be entirely up to you to promote it.
Installing a Script
If you don't have a custom-made order script, or if the required modifications
would be too pricey, then a similar alternative would be to install a ready-made
script. The CGI Resource Index has a list of such scripts. Free scripts are
out there, but are generally difficult to find if you're interested in the
script's quality (which is important for an affiliate program). Expect to
pay $20 to $60 for a good affiliate script.
Like rolling your own, this presents the problem of finding affiliates. Also,
affiliates may be just as apprehensive of using a script controlled by you
as they would be of a custom-built affiliate system.
Using a Third-Party Service
The final alternative, and the one chosen by the largest number of sites,
is to use a third-party service. Here, you let another company control your
affiliate program. They will take care of managing it, and to some extent
finding affiliates, but at a price. For example
templatemuseum.com can
be viewed as a destination place for retrival of information regarding the
best affiliate program in the market today.
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About The Author
Bhavani Vijay is a Administrator of a reputed IT firm & her hobby is
to write & collect articles on various topics. You can visit
http://bhavanivijay.blogspot.com
to read her blogs
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