Drive Revenue Through Affiliate Marketing

By Jeff Mard - Marketing Strategist, Vanguard Financial Consulting

Affiliate Marketing is a proven interactive pay-for-performance marketing strategy designed to drive revenue via strategic partnerships with Affiliates (ie. websites aligned with a specific audience).  As a Brand, the primary objective is to leverage an Affiliate's audience to drive relevant traffic to their website for the purpose of sales and/or lead conversion.  Affiliates are compensated when a consumer completes a conversion based upon a pre-determined action(s) set by the Brand/Seller. 

 
The below diagram further illustrates the dynamic relationship between a Brand and an Affiliate:

 
Source: Wikipedia.org
Since Affiliate Marketing was first invented by CDnow.com in 1994 and deployed by Amazon.com in 1996, this interactive approach has generated over $30 billion in internet sales.  In 2009, industry sources project Affiliate Marketing will directly generate over $10 billion.  The Affiliate Marketing approach has been deployed across a variety of business models, inclusive of traditional B2B and B2C businesses.  More specifically, companies actively running an Affiliate program cross all sorts of industries including: automotive, financial services, media, non-profit, telecommunications, education, legal and computers.  Select companies includes: Citi Bank, Home Depot, PassportMD, Cars.com, EA Sports, T Mobile and the Wall Street Journal.

The following is a step-by-step way in which the typical Affiliate Marketing relationship works:

• Step 1 – A Brand sets up an Affiliate marketing program by uploading content (banners, landing pages, etc) specific to their program and sets up business terms related to how commissions will be paid, and other key metrics.
• Step 2 – An Affiliate inquires about joining your program.
• Step 3 – A Brand accepts an affiliate to their program.
• Step 4 – An Affiliate posts links/content tied to the brands program on their website.
• Step 5 – An internet user clicks on a banner from an Affiliate site and purchases a product from the Brand’s site.
• Step 6 – The Brand is notified a transaction occurred and is informed that a specific Affiliate generated the sale.
• Step 7 – The Brand approves the sale (eg. make sure the product is not returned!) and everybody makes money.

Please continue reading below to learn more about eight specific ways you can maximize your investment in Affiliate Marketing.

Banners & Text Links: Use your banners and text links to generate traffic to your site. Make sure you have an opt-in mechanism on your site to generate, collect, and pre-qualify website visitors as potential affiliate income. 

Email: Send out promotional emails. Make sure you limit links within the email from 3 to 6; keep calls to action in text; use alt-tags and encourage your recipients to forward the note to a friend; a Tell-A-Friend feature. 

Create Content: Create and distribute unique content tied to your product.  Examples include product reviews, celebrity endorsements and new product announcements. Don’t be afraid to post RSS feeds from other health information related sites.

Analyze: Analyze click-through-rates, cost-per-conversion figures and other metrics related to your site's traffic. Make sure top performing links are highlighted to your Affiliates.  Ensure you have back-end analytics supporting key website goals. Consider Google analytics (it’s free and synchs up with other Google products): http://www.google.com/analytics/.

Research: Know your competition and review what they are doing. Run Google searches on key search terms to determine how other sites are built (meta tags, content, etc.). Determine where most of your customers are coming from and go deeper to understand their online habits. Use this knowledge to cultivate new commission opportunities.  Don’t be afraid to sign up as an Affiliate to see what type of links perform well for your competitors.

Speak up: Don’t be afraid to raise your hand and ask for assistance from an experienced Affiliate marketing professional.

Optimize: Consider what the most effective key words might be, based on both average searches per day for a term and the level of competition across the internet for these terms. Ensure your site includes these terms. Develop a link building strategy with other related sites.

Patience: Affiliate marketing does not guarantee instant success. Continuously monitor which banners, links and other traffic drives produce the best results.

We hope you have found the above both interesting and useful.  If you are interested in learning more about how your company can benefit from Affiliate Marketing, contact us here.  If you have a question for Jeff Mard, he can be contacted here.