Now that you have seen what some of the benefits of affiliate marketing are for your company, you need to understand all of the different pieces that must go together in order for your affiliate marketing to work. If you already have your product ready to sell on the web, along with a high quality website and shopping cart, the only other thing that you are going to need is good tracking software for your affiliate program. The software will help you to manage the program far more easily than you could do on your own. Once you have those pieces in place, you will need to make sure that you know about the different components that make up affiliate marketing.
The Moving Parts of Affiliate Marketing
You are the Advertiser, the company that is selling a product or service that needs to have better visibility and higher sales. The Visitors are, naturally, those who are going to be the ones to whom you are trying to sell your products or whom you want to sign up for your services or read your site. You probably know these visitors by another name as well: Customers. In affiliate marketing, you also have the Affiliates. The affiliates are the ones that have websites that target the type of visitors and customers that you want to have, and through their sites, they help to funnel those visitors to your site. For their services, they receive part of the revenue that they send to you, the advertiser.
You also have to consider the Affiliate Network. The networks are the ones who are going to connect your company with the affiliates. You can think of them as the middlemen. They are the ones who are going to find affiliates who want to advertise your products or services. They offer a great service since it means that your company isn’t going to have to spend time and resources just trying to find suitable affiliates who will be able to advertise your products and services for you.
The Nuts and Bolts of Affiliate Marketing
When you start your affiliate marketing program on your site, you will have to use tracking software that will let you manage all of the moving parts. You will have a tracking URL that your affiliates are going to use on their own sites. The link will have an ID number for each affiliate that is working with you, and they will lead right to your products. When a visitor purchases a product or service, or goes to your site, the software tracking system will be able to keep tabs on the affiliate responsible for the sale so that you can make sure that he or she receives compensation. As you can imagine, trying to do this without specialized software would be all but impossible.
Now that you know a bit more about how the software works, and the different pieces that make up your affiliate marketing, you can head on to the next part in the course.
Comments