Affiliate Marketing

“Affiliate Marketing Has Made Businesses Millions And Ordinary People Millionaires.”

− Larry Bussey, CEO of Action, Printing & Paper.

Affiliates are the extended sales force of your business. Affiliate marketing employs one or more third parties to drive sales to the business. It is performance based marketing where an advertiser pays one or more affiliates when they bring viewers or customers with their own efforts.

It is unlike PPC in which advertiser needs to pay the publisher for every visitor it brings to your website.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Once you opt for affiliate marketing, you get access to control panel. Here you can generate a unique URL link to the advertisers’ web pages. When the customer parses that link, he is taken as referrals through that particular affiliate program.
The advertisers may place conversion pixel on thank you page to track sale.

Payment Modules

There are two payment modules −

• Pay for Sales Lead − The payment is made when customer raises an enquiry, irrespective of the purchases incurred by him.
• Pay for Product Sale − The advertiser has to pay a percentage or an amount on sale of every product or services. For example, you are charged 10% on a product sale or Rs. 100 per sale.

Getting Best Out of Affiliate Marketing

• Cloak links − These are the short and pretty links for long URLs of affiliates. These links look good and help in increasing the CTR.
• Write reviews that sell. Add unique selling points to them.
• Include affiliate links to your post.
• Use banners of all affiliate products to reach higher CTR.
• Offer discounts.

Premium Affiliate Programs

• Amazon Associates
• Commission Junction
• Share a Sale

Referral Marketing

There is one more type of marketing called Referral Marketing. As both forms of marketing are based on business associations and employ third parties for increasing sales, they can be confusing.
The main difference between affiliate marketing and referral marketing is that affiliate marketing depends purely on financial motivations to drive sales whereas referral marketing relies on personal relationships and trust among businessmen to drive sales.