Using Affiliate Programs to Boost Web Site Traffic

I received the following advice in an email from AddMe.com and I thought I should share it more widely.

It addresses why merchants should use affiliate programs as part of their online sales drive and well thought through.

Have you ever heard of using affiliate programs to get a boost in targeted visitors to your web site? This can be an excellent web site traffic promotion to put visitors in touch with the products or services you have available on your site.

Let’s say you have a product you have created and are selling on your website for $97 (In this example the product will be an e-Book).

Visitors arriving on your site, pay $97, and can then download the e-Book. Your profit is $97 less any payment processing fees (credit card, etc).

With an affiliate program, you pay a commission for every sale of your product or service that is made by a referral of your affiliate. You pay for results only, no sales means no payment.

This means you are getting someone else to market and promote your web site for free!

What does this mean? More targeted visitors of course as more visitors are sent to you by the affiliate.

It's highly likely that a large portion of the visitors may never have found your web site, so in many ways these sales could be thought of as bonus sales, above and beyond those you would ordinarily have made.

The downside is you need to share a percentage of the sale with the affiliate but you should also remember that it is quite possible the customer will buy more from you in the future.

This is the power of affiliate programs and affiliate marketing in general. Not having an affiliate program is an area where lots of marketers fall down.

Assuming you have an opt-in in place, then not only have you made a sale, but you now have a customer you can promote more products to in the future! One of Marketing 101’s golden rule is that it’s far, far easier to sell to an existing customer than to a brand new one. After all they loved your product enough to buy it, right? You have established a relationship with them at this point, and provided that your product has great relevant content they will be hooked!

The other thing to keep in mind is that it’s likely that you will have a higher percentage of sales from your affiliates visitors because (hopefully) the affiliate has already pre-sold his customers on your fantastic product. More than likely the affiliate has built up a solid reputation with his customers (who more than likely have purchased from him in the past) and because he has recommended your product, they come to your website already pre-sold that your product is a decent and worthy one, and at this point you have a visitor who already trusts and believes in your product because of the relationship they have with the affiliate recommending your products.

You need to think beyond the commission you are paying the affiliate and look instead at the long term relationship you have the potential to build with your new customer.

Make sure you look at using affiliate programs to maximize web site traffic. Payment is only required if the visitor purchases an item, so you have no upfront costs.

Affiliate Programs and the Credit Crunch

Judging from some of the reaction I've read about in the press to the downturn in money supply that has become known as 'The Credit Crunch' you think the world of commerce had come to a full stop.

Friends who know that I'm heavily involved in Internet Marketing have been asking what I'm going to do now that no-one is buying anything. Everyone seems to assume that the online marketing industry has ground to a halt.

Nothing could to be further from the truth.

OK, I've seen a few programs in the financial services sector cease in the last few weeks but there's a high churn in that sector at any time. My advice to anyone involved in a business that might be at risk is 'Don't cut back on advertising. This is your opportunity to steal a march on your competitors who may be cutting back.'

So the money supply has dried up has it? No, it hasn't and neither has people's need for the things they buy. Unless you are in a business that's directly affected your income most likely is unchanged. If you own your home with a mortgage you may have seen your equity fall and in some cases it may even be a nominal negative figure right now. All that means is that if you sold your house you wouldn't raise enough money to clear the mortgage on it. So if you don't have to sell, then don't. It's not rocket science. Negative equity can really be a problem if you're having to move but if you don't just stay put.

I had this situation with a flat I owned when the market crashed in the early 90's. Prices had fallen to the point where I could buy, so I did. All the experts said the market had bottomed out. It hadn't- prices continued to fall. I paid £47,000 for my flat. Eighteen months later it was worth half that. Four years and one child later with another on the way we had to move and the property still wasn't worth what I owed on it. So we rented, and rented the flat out to make up some of the shortfall, and we took in a lodger and I took a second job, working online. Times were tough and I had more outgoings each month than I had incomings and debt started to mount.

The key aout this was it was all planned. Four years later I sold the flat for £75,000, clearing the mortgage and all my debts and leaving a nice balance for me.

So if anyone if worrying - Don't Panic!!!

These things go in cycles but they are so slow in turning that people forget the last time we were at this point.

Anyway back to Internet Marketing. Just this week I've added some new programs to the directory on Global Affiliate Programs. Familiar names such as WH Smith, Yahoo and Wicked Lingerie. Direct Agents have also justed launched their own referal program. They've been running as network fr a while now but have just launched their own program so hopefully I'll start getting paid for the affiliates I refer to them.

I can also confirm that PepperJamNetwork who I have blogged about before do pay on time, through PayPal, as I received my first payment from them since joining a few months back.

I'll leave with a final thought. There's no money around so we're all doomed? Not in this life , we're not and here's why.

On Tuesday a campaign that I support started. It had been planned a few months ago quietly, on the web, between people who knew about it. I've added a link on this blog. It's the link named Atheist Bus Campaign.

A bit of background. There was an article the Guardian newspaper in June which was reproduced in their online discussion forum 'Comment is Free'. It was written by the comedy screenwriter Ariane Sherine and was about how she had been so shocked by a pro-religious ad on a London bus that she had checked out the ad owners website only to be told she was damned to eternal suffering and fire, or words to that effect.

As a throwaway line she suggested that maybe atheists should advertise on buses as well. The small online community that is CIF thought this was a great idea. It was soon discover that a bus ad campaign would cost £11,000. The idea therefore was to raise 2,200 donation of £5 each, the sum which had earlier been suggested as a fair donation.

Ok, so how long should a small atheist online community give itself to raise 2,200 donors?

Firstly in the meantime the biology professor and author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins heard about the campaign from somewhere and promised to match any donation up £5,500, so the target was halfed and the blue touch paper lit.

The idea was to run the ads on buses in Janaury, so the campaign launched itself through the justgiving web site at 7.30 am on 21st October, plannning to raise the £5,500 by January 2009.

The target sum was reached at 10.06 am. It took only two hours 36 minutes for word to get around and for people to donate the amount needed. By lunchtime that sum had doubled. By the evening Christian Voice, an extreme right wing Christian group (actually one bloke as far as we can work out but he's very vocal) had started to condemn the campaign and the speed of donations increased.

After just four days the Atheist Bus Campaign has raise a staggering £102,770.93. The largest donation, excluding that of Professor Dawkins being £3,250 paid in two installments from the one person.

So in January if you are in London you may see buses running around with the line "There's probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life."

So anyone still thinking there's no money out there? You just have to have something people will be willing to part with money for, like a rational view that doesn't scare you with fairy stories.

So in conclusion, as this has gone on longer than I though it would.

There's probably no shortage of money, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.

Boden Kid Clothes Offer

I wanted to let you know about an exciting competition Boden UK are currently running. Boden is currently in summer sale mode and orders are coming in thick and fast. The great news is they also have three sets of Boden vouchers worth £50 each to giveaway in a prize draw!

All you need to do to enter is drive an order for Boden UK between 14th July and 24th July.

To help you Boden UK have a full range of sale banners and text links.

If you haven’t already picked up the sale banners, log in and pick them up here here

If Childrenswear isn't your market don't forget Boden also supply excellent Womenswear, Women's swimwear, Menswear and Men's beachwear.


George

First Steps in Affiliate Marketing

I haven't posted for nearly a couple of weeks but it hasn't been due to laziness; I've actually been working long and hard on changes to my sites. Now I'm finally in position to start blogging about what you need to consider if you want to make a go of affiliate marketing.

You may also notice that I've started adding links and stuff to this blog so that it's clear what it is about and to provide some useful content. This will continue, probably until I reach overload.

Anyway back to Affiliate Marketing. What is Affiliate Marketing anyway? There are many definitions. Wikipedia says Affiliate Marketing is " is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing It then continues further.

I don't like that definition because it makes no sense unless you already know what an affiliate is. I consider Affiliate Marketing to be pre-selling; that is the art, craft, practice or science of presenting goods and services before a selective audience that should be pre-disposed to purchase the said goods or services.

This leads to my first piece of advise to potential affiliates. Don't try to sell snow to eskimos or combs to bald men. To expand on that I'll give you example that may be a bit out of date now.

If your site is all about your pet hamster you may want to place ads on your site that relate to hamsters. Things you would be most likely to sell would be things that your audience, in this case, people who like hamsters, would be likely to buy. These would include hamster cages, bedding, feed, toys etc. You may also find that people who like hamsters also like guinea pigs and rabbits so maybe rabbit hutches will sell. The latest electronic gadgets or in-car accessories are unlikely to shift in massive numbers not because these people don't drive or have ipods but because that is not what they are thinking about if they have reached a site about a hamster.

Ok, so now we know that affiliate marketing involves advertising and selling. The key thing about affiliate marketing that separates it from multi-level marketing, pyramid selling schemes or franchising is that the affiliate never has to see the goods they are selling. This means that the costs can be very low and the rewards can be pure profit. Don't think this means it is easy - it isn't.

Back when I started in affiliate marketing the web, and it seemed the world, was a lot simpler. Most programs were pay-per-click whereby the affiliate provided more of a referral service for the merchant's site. It was simple, you just placed a banner on a prominent part of your site and expected about 1% of viewers to click it, and it worked for a time.

There are still some per-per-click programs around but outside that adult arena they are few and far between. Adsense killed a lot off as well, but I'll discus Google Adsense another time.

These days most programs rely on sales to generate commission for the affiliate. This is fairer because the more the merchant benefits for the work of their affiliates the more the affiliate benefits. But just sticking banners on an existing site isn't enough anymore.

With merchants providing XML feeds of their entire stock for affiliates to use the name of the game now is building a site with the sole purpose of selling stuff. So now our hamster example wouldn't matter. The best way for our hamster fan to make money would be to build a virtual pet shop using content generated from the affiliate programs of real pet shops' websites and maybe link to it from their page about their hamster.

I'll leave it there but return to this theme in my next post.

If anyone is reading this stuff let me know otherwise it feels like I'm talking to myself, which I do a lot as I spend too long alone whilst working on the computer as it is. I can answer questions about affiliate marketing if you have any.

I'll end with a gripe, which is really a warning. One of the reasons I was so busy is that I found that some merchants whose programs I had joined through a respected affiliate network had in fact left that network some time ago and as result the programs had ceased and I was sending traffic to dead links. I had to check out where the programs were now hosted and apply to join them again, sometimes await approval and then change the code on the web pages. Some programs had completely gone and I had to remove them. This could have been avoided had I received an email saying the programs were ending. All programs start, thrive and eventually end; that is life and I'm not griping about that. Most affiliate networks will notify affiliates if programs are about to end. In this case notifications were not sent. So my warning is this - If you join a program check it frequently to make sure it is still active otherwise you're wasting your time.

Speak soon.