eBusiness - Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing has revolutionized the way we do business. It is one of the most common ways of promoting a web based business. It is analogous to paying an agent commission for finding new clients. There are various ways in which affiliates can be compensated for their efforts. Pay per Click/ Lead / Sale is a performance based model. The most attractive part of Affiliate marketing from the business owner’s point of view, is no payment is due to the affiliate, until the results are realized. Some large businesses run their own affiliate programmes while others use third party services to track the traffic generated by affiliates.

In the early days people were cautious about this marketing technique for worries of spamming. As this avenue has matured affiliate marketers have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

• Make Money 24 hours a day – Remember the internet is a global phenomenon. So while you sleep your website may be accessed by people in other parts of the world. If you have placed a banner for some other Business’s site on yours, you just be woken up if you hear the dollars roll in.
• Work from home just part time – You can now turn your attention away from your current income stream and spend as much time as you like choosing new products to sell online.
• Reach 1000s of prospects a day – Click through rates can be as high as 10% with approximately 12 percent of them being converted. This can translate to many 1000s of additional customers, that never existed before.
• Have others sell your products and services for you.. Just as you can choose the products that you wish to sell through your site. So can others. What this means is that your product can potentially be advertised on someone else’s site, so that they can market your products for you.
• You can access markets that you probably are not reaching out to today. Because people who come to your site through affiliate marketing have probably come from another site which has a similar value proposition to yours. So the visitors that are generated rhrough this technique are qualified and easier to sell to
• no need to take and process a single order, or worry about getting paid (you don't even need a merchant account!) -- you simply send people to your affiliated merchants, then get paid when they buy.
  
  Cross Junction
  Click Bank
  Miva