Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing (or
pay-for-performance marketing) is where an advertiser pays for results rather
than paying to reach a particular audience. A publisher advertises products
or services offered by advertisers in exchange for commissions on leads or sales
generated. The publisher displays ads, text links or products on his web site,
in email campaigns, or in search listings, and is paid a commission by the advertiser
when a visitor takes a specific action, such as filling out a form or making
a purchase on the advertiser's site. Merchants do not pay for advertising with
their Affiliates until a sale occurs. They only pay a small commission to referring
Affiliates for resulting sales.
Affiliate Marketing allows you to buy targeted traffic to your site. You
simply pay by results. The concept is simple. You offer website owners an
incentive to link to your site by rewarding them once they send a visitor
that performs a particular 'action'. This 'action' could be the purchase of
your goods or services, earning your Affiliate a percentage of the sale or
a fixed bounty. Affiliate Marketing can also be applied to increase your site's
user base by rewarding Affiliates for sending you registered users or for
simply sending unique visitors to your site. It's all performance based, you
simply pay upon results after securing a profitable transaction.
Improving customer involvement and return visits
Once customers are attracted to e-commerce and e-business sites, marketers try
to keep them involved long enough to accomplish communications and sales objectives.
One strategy to boost customer interactions-or to increase site stickiness-is
to incorporate search capabilities into the site so that customers can easily
find the information they are seeking. Using alternative spellings of products
and brands can facilitate customer navigation of the site. In an increasing
number of cases, multi-lingual sites are also needed. Another strategy is to
provide a site map that illustrates where key blocks of information are stored.
…Whether or not visitors return to e-commerce sites is largely a function
of the perceived value they receive when they do visit. There is little time
to return to poorly designed sites, sites lacking sufficient information,
or those that ultimately do not deliver a good value for the time and money
spent by the consumer…
