Hi Justin,
Affiliate Marketing could be a great solution for your business, especially if you are new to online marketing. The good thing about affiliate marketing is that depending on the type of business you operate, many of the companies you wish to work with will already have programs in place. Signing up for one of their programs sometimes can be as easy as visiting their website and filling out a form. Two websites which manage a large amount of affiliate programs are
cj.com &
sharesale.com. Check these websites out some time and you'll notice that it is pretty easy to get started in affiliate marketing. For both of these services you simply create an account then; from their large database of programs, choose the companies with which you wish to have an affiliate deal.
Keep in mind that this form of marketing is best used when you are advertising specific products. For example let's say you are running an advertisement for sodas on your website. With the standard affiliate marketing model you will need to keep in mind that at least in terms of your affiliate contracts, you will be running advertisements for company A, company B and/or company C - so make sure you know (or can find out) the companies in the industry which you are operating. You are not just advertising sodas, you are advertising a specific brand of soda.
It is important to note that three most popular forms of affiliate marketing models are
Cost per Sale,
Cost per Lead, and
Cost per Click.
Cost per Lead is when a company pays you each time someone clicks on an advertisement on your site and either creates a profile, fills out a form containing their contact information, or signs up for a free trial. The payout for each lead is typically lower than the payout for each sale in the
Cost per Sale model, but since the visitor does not actually have to purchase anything often times each visitor will convert into a lead at a higher rate than converting to a purchased sale. Not all companies offer this but it is something to look out for.
Cost per Click simply means each time someone clicks on your advertisement, the company you are advertising for pays you a fee. The payout per click is usually very low and you will typically only see it practiced on sites with extremely high traffic volume, and, on sites that advertise products which contain little to no relevance to the actual topic/content of the website (ex: a car advertisement on an extremely high traffic sports website).
In terms of how the deals are set up,
Cost per Sale is a great way to keep your marketing costs low while at the same time building a relationship with company you are advertising for. Before going in to a cost per sale relationship it is good to check a few things - the amount of traffic you plan on receiving, the amount of traffic you believe you will be able to send through the advertisement, and how much the company is willing to pay you per sale. Often times in a cost per sale relationship the payout should be significantly higher than in other contracts due to the fact that the company is only writing you a check when someone goes to your site, clicks on the advertisement, then buys a specific product. Keep in mind though that in this type of relationship you are going to be tied to 2 conversion rates, the smaller scale one being "from the people clicking on this advertisement, how many are buying the product" and on a much larger scale "how many visitors to my website does it take to produce one sale from the advertisement(s)". Still, I think the
Cost per Sale model is a great way to start out and learn about affiliate marketing while at the same time keeping your risks low and potentially making some money.
Thanks for using our forum, if you have any further questions feel free to ask,
Reece,
ChooseWhat Staff