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Affiliate Programs Can Help
You!
Affiliate programs. Sounds like heavy stuff.
What are affiliate programs really?
These days, it's so easy to set up your own
webpage. If you have a computer and internet
access, you can simply go to a site such as
GeoCities or Yahoo and use ready-made templates
to construct a simple personal page. These sites
will give you a URL, store the content of your
page and slap on some advertisements. In an hour
or two, Voila! Your page is on the Web!
But what if you have a content-driven website
and want to make money off your traffic? If you
are an online merchant, how can you get people
to your site to buy your products? This is where
affiliate programs come in.
Simply put, affiliate programs, or associate
programs, are arrangements in which an online
merchant pays an affiliate website a commission
to send them traffic. These affiliate websites
post links to the merchant site and are paid
according to a particular agreement. This
agreement is usually based on the number of
people the affiliate sends to the merchant's
site, or the number of people they send who buys
something or perform some other action. Some
arrangements pay according to the number of
people who visit the page containing their
merchant site's banner advertisement. Basically,
if a link on an affiliate site brings the
merchant site traffic or money, the merchant
site pays the affiliate site according to their
agreement. Affiliate programs work great when
selling products online, but it can also be a
cheap and effective marketing strategy. It's a
good way to get the word out about your site.
Here's a good example of affiliate programs in
action. In 1996, Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of
Amazon.com, popularized affiliate programs as an
internet marketing strategy. Amazon.com attracts
affiliates to post links to individual books for
sale on Amazon.com, or for Amazon.com in
general, by promising them a percentage of the
profits if someone clicks on the link and then
purchases books or other items. The affiliate
helps make the sale, but Amazon.com does
everything else: They take the order, collect
the money and ship the book to the customer.
With over 500,000 affiliate Web sites in
participation, Amazon.com's program is a
resounding success.
Over the past few years, affiliate programs have
grown enormously in popularity, taking many
interesting forms. For many Web sites that don't
deal much in e-commerce, functioning as an
affiliate is a good way to jump into e-commerce.
There are three basic types of affiliate
programs payment arrangements:
Pay-per-sale - Amazon's affiliate programs
mentioned above is an example of a pay-per-sale
arrangement. In this arrangement, the merchant
site pays an affiliate when the affiliate sends
them a customer who purchases something.
Some merchant websites, like Amazon.com, pay the
affiliate a percentage of the sale and others
pay a fixed amount per sale.
Pay-per-click - In these affiliate programs, the
merchant site pays the affiliate based on the
number of visitors who click on the link to come
to the merchant's site. They don't have to buy
anything, and it doesn't matter to the affiliate
what a visitor does once he gets to the
merchant's site.
Pay-per-lead - Companies with these affiliate
programs pay their affiliates based on the
number of visitors they refer who sign up as
leads. This simply means the visitor fills out
some requested information at the merchant site,
which the merchant site may use as a sales lead
or sell to another company as a sales lead.
There are a number of other arrangements as
well. But basically, a company could set up
affiliate programs based on any action that
would benefit them, and then pay their
affiliates based on the number of customers the
affiliates send them who perform that action.
Most affiliate programs also prohibit offensive
content, but generally speaking, any website
could be involved in an affiliate program.
Although they are commonly called merchants,
websites don't even need to sell anything to
benefit from having affiliates. A lot of
content-based Web sites get most of their money
from advertisers, which are attracted by high
traffic numbers. Because of this, traffic
translates directly into profit
for these sites.
There are all sorts of affiliate programs, from
top Web sites to small personal pages. Basically
any website can join affiliate programs, and if
they choose well, they could just make some
money off of it. Some sites, such as Memolink
and MyPoints, are just big collections of
affiliate programs. These sites join a variety
of pay-per-click or pay-per-lead programs and
then pay their visitors a fraction of the
commission on each click or reward them with
prizes.
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