••• Affiliate Marketing: What It Is and Why You Should Get Involved

What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is basically a revenue sharing arrangement in which advertisers (merchants) distribute sales collateral (banners, text links, etc.) and recruit partners, called affiliates, who agree to display the advertisements on their web sites in exchange for a commission on any leads or sales that result from actions derived from those advertisements.

So, really, affiliate marketing harkens back to marketing in its purest form. The second oldest business there is: “If you sell something for me, I’ll give you a percentage”. It is simply the use of a web site to sell products or recruit customers in a way that’s been used for centuries!

Affiliate marketing is also known by a series of names, including:

Associate Programs
Internet Affiliate Marketing
Direct Marketing
Performance Marketing
Partner Marketing
Pay-For-Performance Programs
Referral Programs
In affiliate marketing programs, an affiliate earns a commission from a merchant for generating a desired action, such as a lead or sale, for a merchant that the affiliate is promoting. The merchant provides its ads (also called creatives) to affiliates and offers a pre-determined commission for each action it wants visitors to take. Affiliates place a tracking code for these ads on their websites, in search listings or in their email campaigns. Whenever a visitor uses these links to generate the desired action on the merchant site, these online actions are tracked and recorded by a reliable tracking program. When the desired action is verified, the affiliate is paid a commission for that verified desired action.

Affiliate recruitment is the most important and the most time consuming element of building a successful affiliate marketing program. Identifying who the best affiliates are for your site, persuading them to join your program and giving them compelling reasons to stay with you and sell, are all critical elements of success in this channel. We believe the key to a successful affiliate program is recruiting high quality affiliates that have contextually relevant sites to yours and who have proved track records driving traffic to programs they belong to.

We go after affiliates in three categories: Top - Known "super" affiliates whose business model is based on affiliate revenue Primary - Those affiliates already successfully working in your industry niche Secondary - Sites whose content is complementary to your site's products who can be motivated to begin promoting your products on their sites Each type is part of the success formula and it's the synergy of all three that create a consistent and balanced program. Our proactive, creative, powerful, concentrated approach includes; Recruitment through virtually every facet of both your niche market and main stream markets. We don't just submit you to the portals and wait, we don't just go after sites that your site will complement, and we work to develop and uncover new opportunities. We place ourselves in your customers' minds and acquire an understanding of their behavior, then we find out were they go and place you everywhere they are. We gain understanding of your competition through research we integrate you into the path of you competitions' customers and affiliates.

What we do when recruiting and acquiring affiliates:

Manual submission to all major affiliate program portals and directories twice a year
Heavy Forum PR and recruitment on Top Affiliate Boards
50-100 of targeted emails sent weekly to potential affiliates
Post and monitor your program in DirectLeads Advertising Network of 11,000 affiliates (if applicable)
Search Engine spidering for prospects linked to your competitors or using your keywords
Use Niche Directories for prospecting
Ezines, E-books, Newsgroups & E-newsletter searches for relevant affiliates
Top Sites strategic Partnerships explored
Online shopping Malls, Coupon & Freebie sites reviewed for appropriate rev-share deals

Advertisers and Publishers: Two sides of a winning arrangement

The advertisers/merchants are typically referred to as affiliate merchants and the publishers/salespeople are referred to as affiliates.

Benefits of affiliate marketing include the potential for automating much of the advertising process (accepting and approving applications, generating unique sales links, tracking and reporting of results) and payment only for desired results (sales, registrations or clicks).

Paying only for performance shifts much of the advertising risk from the merchants to the affiliates, although merchants still assume some risk of fraud from partner sites.

Affiliate marketing has contributed to the rise of many leading online companies. Amazon.com, one of the first significant adopters, now has hundreds of thousands of affiliate relationships. It is not uncommon to see industries where the major players have affiliate programs--often structured in a similar manner and making similar competitive changes over time.