What is Affiliate Marketing ?

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a way of marketing which advertiser’s uses to get maximize their return on the investment through one or more Affiliates. In the current Indian Internet marketing scenario Affiliate marketing plays a very important role. As you will see less number of people going outside to play cricket because of shortage of playground they play cricket on their lap.So if a business is thinking of flourishing without internet marketing they will go 10 years back then their competitors and affiliate marketing is an integral part of internet marketing.

Affiliate Marketing works for

·               Advertisers

·               Publishers

Advertisers in a lay man term is one who have the end product or the services..For example If I am a job seeker and looking for a job in India I may go to google and type jobs in India and the first site in the results I get is jobsindia.com which may not have any jobs for me how ever I can see a banner on that site for Monster.com where I can find so many jobs for me. Banner is what you can say is just like a hoarding the difference it’s on the internet so you can say monster is an Advertiser using affiliate marketing to get more job seekers on their website and jobindia is an Affiliate.

Now lets talk about how an Affiliate / Publisher can promote Advertiser in affiliate marketing.

Publisher may use different methods to promote a Affiliate Program

·               Display Advertisements

·               Email Marketing

·               Newsletter

·               PPC

·               SMO

·               Media Buying

·               Forums

·               Word of mouth

·               Mobile Advertising

·               Viral marketing

Display Advertisements:-

Affiliate/Publishers can promote a advertisers through banner placement on their site. Banners are available in different formats JPG. Flash etc . These are provided by the Affiliate Programs with the unique tracking available for the affiliates to track the performance of the campaign in the Affiliate programs panel. Most of the affiliate programs do provide real time tracking it is always recommended to check the tracking by yourself just to be sure that your leads are tracking 100%.Banner advertisements work in different model Pre paid Ads where in advertisers pay for certain amount for a fixed period of time. For Advertiser it is very important to check the stats of the sites before going for the deal and see what is the demographic they want to target is that the traffic which they really want to target. They may use sites like Alexa to see the traffic quality and the demographic of the traffic.

Email Marketing:-

Email marketing is very important way of getting fast results for your campaign is commonly used by the publishers to make some quick money and the affiliate programs programs do provide creative’s .All the publisher needs in this case is a data base of Email addresses of the demographic .there are many system available in the market to send the emails out  . few I personally recommend is Email brain and vertical response.

Newsletter/RSS feed:-

Newsletter or RSS feed is good way of updating your subscribers about new promotions and updates  this is a good way to reach the visitors those who have visited your website over and over again if not the website they can sign up for the services or product you want to promote. Affiliates are using this to promote different programs at the same time.

PPC (pay per click):-

PPC also called as pay per click which is a good way to market the product if the site is not optimized on search engines and to get traffic on the sites publishers/advertisers use this to get traffic by bidding on the most commonly used keywords .Publishers may take help of google adwords  to see what keyword is visitors are looking for in search engines for their niche.PPC is done on Microsoft adCenter ,Google Adwords and Yahoo Search. Publishers pay on clicks to serch engines.

SMO (Social Media optimization or Social Media Marketing)

With most of the people spending maximum time in the Social networking sites if your product doesn’t have presence on sites like facebook twitter or My space etc it will be hard to make brand awareness. Social media marketing on sites like face book can be done in a different way making pages for your product and then people liking that page you can also advertize that page on facebook using facebook ads where it becomes easier as you know every little detail of the user for example their interest sex location and age etc .Twitter account can be used to update all the followers for all the changes made or new updates on the sites and there are many ways to do get traffic through these sites.

Media Buying:-

Media buying is when publisher promote the products or services from the affiliate programs using other sites when they buy space in form of banner advertisements or they use other affiliates those who promote for them by taking a fixed price from the media buyer.

Online Forums:-

Forums are very good way to keep your visitor engaged and express their opinion about your product and services. Publishers generate huge traffic for affiliate programs using this method. Forums are available for free on the net which you need to embed and constantly update your user just by putting link in the form of posts

.

Word of Mouth:-

Word of mouth has always been a good way of marketing it is used both in online and offline marketing It can be used by the publishers to promote the product among people they know and to create a viral for example Affiliate can extract their friends from the email they use and promote any website to them and they can create a Viral of it.

Mobile Marketing:-

With the inclusion of 3G in India and world now Advertising through mobile phone is picking up with the publishers every day there are millions users those who are joining the Mobile Internet .As there is less competition right now in mobile marketing it makes a very good option for affiliates money to convert this traffic in to real. Mobile marketing is growing and lack of knowledge in this space makes it a viable option.

Viral marketing:-

Viral marketing is the best way of marketing when you want to spend lesser money. Good way for those Affiliates/publishers those who don’t want to spend a lot of amount on developing a site. They can create a Viral through emails social networking sites through sending messages on the Mobile cheap and best way to market the product or services.

Affiliate Marketing Model:-

There are different ways of affiliate marketing offered by affiliate programs available for the Affiliates or publishers however it all depends on the product which Affiliates have opted for .Different models work differently for affiliates .Affiliates are more interested in Cost per impression as it is not demanding for an action from the visitors where as Advertisers are keenly interested in CPA or revenue share as it is result oriented and achieving ROI is possible.

·               CPM ( COST PER THOUSAND IMPRESSION)

·               CPC ( COST PER CLICKS)

·               CPA OR CPS (COST PER ACQUISTION)(COST PER SALES)

·               CPL (COST PER LEADS)

·               CPA (COST PER ACQUISTION )

·               REV SHARE (REAVENUE SHARE)

·               PRE PAID

CPM (COST PER THOUSAND IMPRESSIONS)

Cost per thousand impressions is one of the most preferred model opted by the publishers as it never demands an action from the visitor. It is calculated on the basis of thousand Impressions .For example when you open a website you see a pop up coming even if you opt out of the pop up still you are counted as one impression. From a advertiser point of view it is a method they have high risk whether the campaign will convert or not .It is more suitable for those advertisers those who want to do more of branding then looking for sales from the campaign.

The total money spend on a CPM deal is measured by multiplying  CPM rate by the no. of CPM. For example, 1M views or impressions at RS 10 CPM are equal to RS 10,000 total amount.

All most all Indian Affiliate Programs Offers CPM to their affiliates as in India not many internet visitors are ready to buy products on line.

CPC (COST PER CLICKS)

Cost per click requires an action from the visitor that can only be generated just by a click of the visitor. It is much safer affiliate model for the affiliate programs as it requires an action which shows the intent of the user in the product or services so it is much safer model then CPM for Advertisers. Rates of CPC are much higher than a CPM. However there is lot of click fraud happening on the internet people getting clicks for some other product and landing some other place that’s click frauds. so it is always recommended for affiliate programs to give this model to those affiliates or publishers they are sure that they are not indulge in these activities.

For Example an advertisers offer an affiliate that he is going to pay RS 10 for 20 clicks from the publisher.

CPA OR CPS (COST PER ACQUISTION)(COST PER SALES)

Cost per acquisition is one of the best models for the advertisers and affiliate programs love to give these offers to the affiliates with the growing trend of people buying products online as they get better choices .Advertisers can achieve their ROI in this method as there is an action required from the visitors that ends up in a sale. However publishers in India are bit reluctant in picking up an offer for CPA in India as Indian internet users are not that keen to buy products online.CPA pays well to the affiliate as it can go very high. There are few things which advertiser has to take care of while giving out a CPA to make sure that the traffic is not an incentivized traffic  if that is what they are not looking for.

For Example CPA normally is very high from the minimum purchase on the site .RS100 on a minimum purchase of RS 25

CPL (COST PER LEAD)

Cost per lead is growing rapidly in upcoming markets like India as user just sign up for the services he doesn’t need to buy anything and later on the sales team can put in all the efforts to convert those leads in to actual purchase on the site.

Revenue Share

Revenue share is best for those affiliates those who are looking for recurring income from the affiliate program it happens where in there are multiple purchases made by the visitor. Publishers can receive money even after sending a visitor 5 years so a click paying you money for years nothing better than that..Ina way a publishers is a partner in the profits made by the Advertiser. For Example If a Publisher sends user to a shopping site and if he is on a revenue share % of 25% and the visitor buys shoes of RS 1000 that means the publisher gets RS 250.and on the second purchase same user buys a pen of RS 100 again the affiliate get a 25 so as long as the user stays on the site and keep buying the Affiliates gets paid.

Pre Paid Model

In this model advertiser just pays a fixed amount to an affiliate for a spot on a site or maybe they pay for example for a email shot of 1000 emails in this case affiliate doesn’t have to worry about the results of the campaign and the advertisers is not worried that they have to pay a big amount on the purchases made by the user on the advertisers site however the advertiser have to be sure of the traffic which the publisher is generating.