Feature: Affiliate marketing

More details:

Per Sale: Offering commissions "per sale" is the dominant method. It involves providing a fixed fee or percentage commission for each successful sale.

Per clickthrough: Paying affiliates per clickthrough involves paying a fee for each visitor that your affiliates drive to your site. It is the easiest method to track and may be the best for certain kinds of businesses. However, paying for clickthroughs requires more monitoring by the merchant. The merchant must make sure that the visitors are targeted; specifically that there are no misleading links or misdirection leading to the merchant's site. An easy way to verify your top affiliates' sites is to go to your site statistics and check your "referrers." This section in your site statistics will list the top websites that send traffic to your website. Then visit the referrer sites and verify that they do not contain misleading links.

Per Lead: Pay per lead involves paying your affiliates for each sales lead that they generate for you. Even though defining a "lead" is difficult, it may be the only method that makes sense for certain merchants. For example, if it is unlikely that you will make sales without at least a telephone conversation, you might prefer to receive hot leads from your affiliates.

To be set up you must 1) have the tracking program in place, 2) have determined your commission structure 3) have attracted a team of affiliates. Once you are set up the next task is to help your affiliates to do well. Encourage affiliates by offering extra incentives. Provide tools such as banners and searches for them to link to your site. Think of them as a sales team that requires your support. Diggins' says that an affiliate is:

"like a travelling sales man, like a franchiser, like many things but no exact parallel exists in traditional business. You have to treat it just as seriously as if you were franchising things out. You can't go in half-cocked. The biggest drawback is poor planning. If you have to go back and fix an error such as lowering commission rates for instance, it will cause a major setback to your affiliate program."

This Newsletter is produced and published by Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc. © 2000-2003