Successful business owners know the best way to bring even more traffic to their website is to create an affiliate program.
The size of the business is irrelevant.
Any business that sells a product or service will benefit from the creation of an affiliate program.
Entrepreneurs have a very broad variety of affiliate marketing techniques to choose from.
Whether they choose pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, commission-based or a multi-tier program depends on the type of business and marketing they expect to attract.
Some affiliate marketing techniques work better for certain business types than others.
Employing an Internet marketing expert will save time and money in the long run.
Don't try to reinvent the wheel.
Use any of the already-successful affiliate marketing techniques available to you.
It is perfectly OK to put your own spin on things, but don't overwhelm yourself by trying to create a whole new program.
Affiliate Marketing and Performance Marketing Performance marketing is another term for affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing programs are designed to increase the performance of the extended sales force they attract.
They're ultimately designed to create more traffic and more sales for your business.
You must be willing to compensate people who help as a means to that end.
Most affiliate programs are one-tier, but don't overlook the monetary gains of a multi-level affiliate marketing program.
Multi-level marketing (MLM) programs allow each individual partner to build an affiliate downline and create a referral based affiliate business.
Programs that involve more than two tiers are considered MLMs.
The hierarchical structure of an MLM requires a performance based compensation method.
Each individual chain or downline may recruit hundreds of individuals.
This type of growth is called exponential growth and may be taken advantage of using almost any affiliate marketing technique.
Compensation Methods More than 80 percent of affiliate programs base their compensation model on a cost per sale (CPS) method.
CPS is also known as revenue sharing.
The affiliate partner and affiliate merchant each receive a specific pre-determined amount from each sale.
Cost per action (CPA) is a quickly growing compensation model for businesses that rely on client registrations.
The most popular CPA techniques require an action by the person who clicked on the affiliate partner's link.
Once that action, usually a registration or purchase, has been confirmed, the affiliate marketer is compensated.
Cost per mille (CPM) is one of the lesser-used compensation models.
This method requires thousands of clicks to generate a relatively small amount of revenue.
When properly marketed it can be quite lucrative, but many businesses steer clear of it.
Cost per action, cost per click and cost per mille increase the possibility of click fraud.
Click fraud occurs when the advertiser has friends and family click their affiliate links and there is no chance that those clicks will be converted to sales.
The advertiser is effectively scamming the affiliate merchant.
Affiliate Marketing Techniques to Avoid Avoid all types of spam.
Don't rely on e-mail spam, search engine spam or any other form of advertising that will ultimately lead to the downfall of organic search engines.
The Internet population recognizes spam and your business will be labeled.
Once a spammer, always a spammer! Adware is not only considered spam, most of the Internet population considers it spyware.
Adware and spyware use the same technologies, so several anti-virus programs pick them up as potentially damaging to the PC.
Word of mouth travels at the speed of light on the Internet and will damage your reputation as a legitimate affiliate merchant.