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When planning a marketing strategy for you business it is important to consider the growing online market. The internet is so commonplace now that it is only natural to market your company on it. Online marketing is now a necessity to grow and thrive as a business. One such form of online marketing is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a system where an affiliate is rewarded for every customer/visitor they bring to the buyer of seller. So an example of this would be a potential customer browsing another website and seeing and clicking a link that would bring them to your business's website. As a result you more potential customers and the website that is linking the customers to you gets a payment by you in return.
The three most common forms of affiliate marketing are cost per action, contextual advertising, and revenue sharing. Cost per action is a system where the affiliates are paid depending on the specific actions of the customer. For example, a company may pay the affiliates for customers that buy something from their site.
Contextual advertising is a system where the ads seen by consumers on an affiliate's website are chosen by an automated system to cater towards the consumer. This way the ads are more relevant to what the consumer is looking for and as a result has a higher chance of being clicked. The final system is revenue sharing which is the sharing of a certain amount of profits with your affiliate company.
The general advantage of affiliate marketing is that it is very low risk. Because it is a pay for performance system, you will not be stuck paying for advertising that has not done anything. You will only pay an affiliate if you are receiving traffic from their website. So it is safe to have several affiliates at once because you are still only paying for the amount of customers they bring in. the websites that bring in little to no traffic will in turn receive little to no pay from you.
The potential downside of affiliate marketing is that your company may be mistaken as a spam website. Because of companies that have abused online advertising through email spamming, pop-ups, and ad-ware company links on sights carry a bit of a negative connotation. Also there have been issues with scaling when it comes to affiliate advertising.
These are small issues considering the amount of good affiliate marketing can bring a company. It is a smart and effective way to get your companies name out into the world.
Thank You,
Kevin Jacobson
Internet Marketing & Online Business Pro
(Markethive Launch Member & Entrepreneur One)
