Tag: affiliate marketing business

Starting an Affiliate Marketing Campaign


The affiliate strategy

Some business owners opt to start an affiliate marketing campaign as part of their overall marketing strategy. These business owners are usually referred to as merchants, and in most cases the affiliate marketing campaign is only a small portion of their overall marketing strategy. But there many business owners choose to rely exclusively on this type of marketing. The main purpose of doing this is to save money while still achieving valuable advertising.

However, once a business becomes more successful they should consider being more proactive and combining affiliate marketing with other types of Internet marketing such as placing banner ads and orchestrating an email marketing campaign. This article will take a look at what affiliate marketing is and will provide insight into why this is popular and how it can be used effectively.

Affiliate marketing campaigns

An affiliate marketing campaign is essentially a situation where other website owners place ads for your business on their websites. These website owners are known as affiliates. It is important to understand how this type of marketing works. In general the affiliates are given code for your banner ad to place on their website and given the freedom to promote their own website as they see fit. In promoting their website they are also attracting attention to your website because of the banner ad directing visitors to your own website.

One of the most appealing elements of affiliate marketing centers on the fact that the affiliate is only compensated when s/he produces a desired result. This means the business owner is not obligated to pay an affiliate unless the affiliate is successful. Success may be defined as generating traffic to the website, resulting in a sale or even resulting in the Internet user registering on the business owner’s website or filling out a survey.

Affiliate compensation

The compensation for affiliates is generally based on cost per click, cost per lead or cost per sale. Cost per click and cost per lead are usually paid a flat fee which is awarded to the affiliate each time an Internet user either simply clicks through the banner ad on the affiliate’s website or performs a specific action after clicking through the ad. Cost per sale may result in the affiliate being awarded a flat fee or a percentage of the sale depending on the agreement between the business owner and the affiliate.

The most effective use of affiliate marketing is to actively seek out affiliates with a proven track record of promoting the businesses which they support. Most affiliate programs are open to anyone with a website and it is not necessarily damaging to allow those who are not particularly knowledgeable about marketing to run your banner ad but it is far more worthwhile to seek out affiliates who are quite adept and generating website traffic to their own website. This is important because the more visitors they receive each month the more likely your website it to receive interest from visitors who click on the affiliates banner ad.

The banner ad

Another aspect of affiliate marketing which can contribute to success or failure is the design of your banner ads. It is important to remember affiliate marketing is viewed the same way other types of marketing are viewed and care should be taken to create banner ads which will be appealing to your target audience. This means everything from the colors of your ad to the size and style of the font should be carefully considered to create an appealing advertisement.

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Choosing the Right Affiliate Marketing Mentor




Affiliate marketing mentorship

A good affiliate marketing mentor is someone who has already achieved success in his/her own affiliate marketing business and is willing to share the knowledge – both experience-based and otherwise – s/he has acquired about this business, from the viewpoint of both affiliate and merchant. But being able to choose the right affiliate marketing mentor to follow and emulate, especially when such choosing involves payment of a fee or other costs, is not easy; and it is for this reason that we wanted to share a few thoughts about this topic with you.

It is important that you know what programs, features and methodologies an affiliate marketing mentorship package should encompass, and understand why the mentor offers a particular set of items in such a package. Keep in mind that affiliate marketing has been a popular Web-based business for decades, and it is still among the most viable business types pursued by online entrepreneurs today.

That having been said, however, there is still a large section of the population that knows little or nothing about affiliate marketing; and most people who have recently discovered this business assume that they can easily make big money in a short period of time (overnight?) with little or no work; but this assumption is no more accurate than the one which suggests that owning and operating a successful home-based business requires only a phone and a computer with Internet access.

Balancing affiliate links and banners

The point is that, achieving success in the affiliate marketing business is not an easy task and certainly will not happen overnight. On the contrary, management of an affiliate marketing business has been compared to an ongoing assignment where you need to learn new methods and test various advertising strategies and tactics, whereby the affiliate may even need to sign up with numerous affiliate programs just to determine which merchants performs best.

Another misconception that exists about affiliate marketing is that more affiliate links and banners placed on a website translates to more commissions earned; but too many links and banners on a single website will more likely have the opposite effect in the sense that visitors will see an unattractive pile of non-sensical and unappealing content, and therefore leave that site for another which provides interesting content that is of more interest to them.

Of course there is a way in which to promote multiple affiliate products on your website if you really want to do so; but you would have to make sure that the promotional links and banners jive with the theme and topic of your site, as well as your niche-specific content. Keep in mind also that three or four affiliate links on your site should really be enough to attract a visitor’s attention, depending on the size of your web page.

Affiliate marketing mentor defined

There are affiliates who think that if they add affiliate materials to their site, they can make sales right away; and maybe they just don’t know that affiliate marketing is more about advertising than anything else, because if there’s no traffic coming to a given site, chances are that sales from that site will be non-existent. So the important thing to remember is: the more exposure (through advertising) an affiliate link, or the site on which affiliate links are displayed receives, the more activity these links are likely to generate.

If you want to get involved with, or you’ve already joined, an affiliate program but you are among those who harbor the above misconceptions about this type of business, then you really might need a mentor to help you figure out where to start and what to do in order to achieve success.

The word mentor is defined in dictionary as “a wise and trusted counselor or teacher.” So an affiliate marketing mentor would essentially be an individual who has acquired sufficient affiliate marketing wisdom and knowledge to be trusted as a competent teacher. In other words, such a person is an expert in the field and therefore can give expert advice and guidance as well as supervision to another person.

So when we say affiliate marketing mentors, we refer to experienced counselors that have made affiliate marketing their specialty. Of course, it is good for an affiliate marketing mentor to know and apply some theories and generalities regarding your business, but there’s nothing more helpful and effective than telling the client what works today and identify those things that could probably work in the future, including new trends, trend changes and other such market-related data.

Measuring a mentor’s success

A mentor should be a source of knowledge for his/her clients, and the first one to instruct those clients on how to generate more affiliate income. S/he also needs equipped with the keys to success for affiliate marketers as well as for merchants, and be able to guide clients as they try to do the things that can help boost their profit margin, because once they do well in their business, they will, no doubt, give credit to the mentor for the role s/he played in their success.

More succinctly put: Client Success Equates to Mentor Success!

There are some articles on affiliate marketing which states that, in order to be triumphant in the affiliate marketing business, the affiliate needs to encompass and develop these traits: persistence, patience and thirst for knowledge. And part of a mentor’s job to help clients develop and nurture these traits within themselves.

Once the clients have developed the abovementioned characteristics, it will become easier for the mentor to explain to them that attaining success in affiliate marketing requires an investment of hard work, some money and a substantial time commitment. These traits will also teach them to persist and never to give up on their goals and objectives.

Moreover, before a mentor trains his/her client to be proficient in search engine optimization, link exchanges, email marketing, newsletter marketing, reciprocal exchanges and advertising in forums, s/he should first become an expert in these fields. They will surely find it hard to learn these things alone and without supervision from the one they trust to have this knowledge. So the mentor must make sure that s/he is knowledgeable in these areas before accepting any invitation to be a mentor to someone else.

No easy task

Yes, being an affiliate marketing mentor is significantly more difficult than starting an affiliate marketing business, but mentorship can be very rewarding, especially if the mentor’s client achieves great success. The mentor, understanding that a client’s failure equates to the mentor’s failure, must do everything in his/her power to do the very best s/he can to put clients on the road to success.