Affiliate program – What is it?

I am sure you have heard the term “affiliate program” or “affiliate marketing”.

In case you do not know what it means, this article will give you an overview.  Affiliate program is an agreement between the vendor of a product or service and a so called affiliate.

You could be wearing either shoe. You could be the vendor of your services or products or you could be the affiliate that will promote other persons products.

So how does it all start?

The vendor has a website with products or services and in the website he encourages affiliates to join the affiliate program, it is free to join an affiliate program.

Once the affiliate joins his role is to drive traffic to the vendor’s site. He can  do this in different ways, some ways are cheaper and some are more expensive.

Once the affiliate drives traffic to the website, depending on the action of the visitor and on the affiliate agreement the affiliate will be paid by the vendor. There are different types of agreements:

The affiliate could be paid:

Per Sale: If the person that visits the vendors site as a result of the affiliate campaign  buys the product or service, then the affiliate will be paid a commission

Per visitor: The affiliate will be paid based on the number of visitors he has sent to the vendor’s site

Per lead: the affiliate will be paid based on the number of people that visit the vendor’s website and give their contact details (email address).

The vendor will provide affiliates with all the marketing material, like banners, emails to send, text links and will provide them with an affiliate link that can used to track the traffic.

The advantage of being an affiliate marketer is that you can earn a commission without having to create a product, worry about websites or dealing directly with customers.

For the vendor the advantage is that he is having a very effective marketing system and at a much affordable cost than in the offline world.

Now to manage an affiliate program involves some work. There needs to be a system in place. There are some companies that would run the system for the vendor, like commission junction or clickbank. They will have a system that keeps track of which affiliate sold a product and they would do the payment on behalf of the vendor. There is a cost involved for the vendor. Besides these two there are other programs depending on your product type and on your country.

Otherwise you can buy software that would help you with the tracking of the affiliate information.  Some examples are Infusionsoft and shopping cart. But you will still need someone to manage it.

In both cases you will still need to provide the marketing material

This is a general overview of the affiliate program. Please give me some feedback if you found this article useful and please post any questions you may have.

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