Monday, September 15, 2008

Affiliate Marketing Helps in SEM

Nowadays The Internet offers many ways to make money online. Affiliate marketing is one of them. An example of affiliate marketing is the Amazon product links that some people place on their website. If a third party clicks on an Amazon Associates link on your website and purchases a product, Amazon will pay you a percentage of the sale as a commission. Of course, depending on your site traffic, the product links and your conversion rate, your commission check can either be latte money or whole lotta money.

Affiliate marketing widens the scope of your internet presence by encouraging other websites to become advocates for your services, increasing your online exposure and improving the efficiency of your advertising spends. Affiliate marketing, also called referral or paid lead generation advertising, is a method used on the Internet that allows for income sharing between websites. It is a process where sites are created specifically to generate highly relevant leads and traffic to specific landing pages of our clients.

Main goals of Affiliate Marketing Service
1. The creation of a steady flow of sales leads for your business.
2. Brand building of your business on the Web.
3. The provision of leads for future target marketing by your company through efforts that include e-newsletters, SMS, MMS, and referral advertising.
4. Getting into the top ten search result listings for keywords relevant to your company or products.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing is a solid and very effective web marketing tool. The strength of this type of marketing lies in the indirect nature of the websites through which partnerships are formed. The affiliate builds traffic by carefully addressing the individual interests of each user and tailoring their content to potential customers' needs and expectations, before delivering a call to action through to your site.

The most basic affiliate marketing programs fall under two categories: pay-per-click (PPC), and pay-per-performance (PPP).

Pay Per Click (PPC):
PPC is the most popular type of affiliate marketing for affiliates with small websites, and probably the easiest way for them to earn money. In this affiliate marketing type, the merchant pays his affiliate whenever a visitor is referred to his site that is whenever someone clicks through the merchant's banner or text ads. The affiliate gets paid a certain amount even if the visitor he referred does not purchase anything from the merchant's site. However, typical fees for PPC affiliate programs are small, usually not exceeding a dollar for every click.

Pay Per Performance (PPP):
PPP affiliate marketing is the most popular among merchant and is also the most lucrative type for the affiliates. In this type of affiliate program, the merchant only pays the affiliate whenever his referral translates into an action—that is whenever the visitor he has referred actually buys something from the merchant's site or when the visitor becomes a lead. This means a lot of savings for the merchant. On the other hand, it becomes the most lucrative type for the dedicated affiliate, for commissions in PPP affiliate marketing usually comes in the range of 15% to 20% of the actual product sales.

These types of affiliate marketing are based on various levels or tiers in the affiliate network by which payments are made.

Single Tier -
In a single-tier affiliate marketing program, the affiliates are paid based on the direct sales or traffic he has referred to the merchant. Most of the time, unless specified, all the affiliate marketing types mentioned earlier (i.e. PPS, PPL, and PPC) fall under the single-tier classification.

Two Tier -
In two-tier affiliate marketing programs, the affiliates are not only paid for the direct traffic or sales that he brings to the merchant's site, but also on every traffic or sales referred by other affiliates who joined as sub-affiliate of the above affiliate marketer.

Multi Tier -
Multi-tier affiliate marketing works the same way, although the affiliate gets additional commission for more number of levels of affiliates in different tiers in the affiliate network.

The perception of people about affiliate marketing has undergone a sea change with the rising popularity of affiliate marketing. Today, no one considers affiliate marketing as an alternative method of advertisement of products by a merchant or as a source of additional income for an affiliate. As of now, affiliate marketing has become the main source of profits and revenues for the merchants as well as for the affiliates.

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