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Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Benefits
Programme Types
Merchant Benefits
Merchant Resources
Classic Mistakes
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Affiliate Marketing
Benefits to Merchants
How would you like to have an army of people marketing your business, recommending your products to others and sending visitors to your website?
Better still, what if they did all this work without any up-front payment and only got paid on results, - results that you specify? You could pay a fixed amount per visitor to your website, just like pay per click but with you in control rather than Google or Yahoo. Or you could pay per lead, in other words pay for a specific enquiry, complete with contact details for you to follow up and close the deal. Most merchants opt to pay commission on sales, either a fixed amount per sale or, more commonly, a percentage of the selling price or profit on the sale.
If this sounds a lot better than paying for advertising and then waiting to see if it brings in business, or sending out hundreds of letters at substantial cost in the hope that it might make some sales, then maybe you need to take a closer look at affiliate marketing.
I know a lot of businesses have tried this before without much success and such stories abound, but this is often because they have used the well known principal of "throw a lot of mud at the wall and hope some of it sticks!". To be successful at affiliate marketing as a merchant, you need to:
- Choose the right affiliates
- Train them well in your product and it's benefits
- Ensure that they understand your market and it's needs
- Provide them with good marketing material and support
- Reward them well by both payment and incentives
- Pay them on time consistently!
Treat them just like you would your own sales team, they're worth it! The big advantage is, you don't employ them - with all the associated costs that entails. You don't have to pay them a basic salary or provide a company car or other perks. You just pay them when they provide the results that you want.
Utilised correctly, affiliates are effectively FREE sales people. They cost you nothing because their payment comes out of the profit you otherwise would NOT have made! Think carefully about this, many merchants come unstuck because they begrudge paying out a proportion of the profit on each sale - but without the affiliate, they wouldn't have had the sale or the resultant profit in the first place.
Setting up an affiliate programme can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. A lot depends on the range and quantity of products you have for sale and the number of affiliates you want to deal with - you choose.
You could use an affiliate network to manage everything for you or you could set up your own. Or you could start with the network until you have some experience of marketing through affiliates, then set up your own. However, you would not have access to the services of affiliates provided through the network, only those who you recruit yourself.
Check out the websites in the merchant resources page for details of both affiliate networks and DIY affiliate management software.
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