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An affiliate program is an online Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising program offering monetary incentives for a website to drive traffic to the advertiser's website. The advertiser pays a commission to the affiliate for the clicks, leads, or sales generated from a link located on the affiliates' site. Unlike organic SEO results developed by a professional custom website design company like Dynamic Digital Advertising (DDA) who design websites with relevancy in mind, affiliate programs eliminate an advertisers need to find a website with related content to generate the targeted audience for their product.
Types of Affiliates
Marketers break affiliates down into 3 main categories: super affiliates;
active but underproductive affiliates; or inactive affiliates1. Overall,
there are 6 types of affiliates. Super affiliates, the top 2%, are hard
to find and aren't easy to recruit. Power Affiliates, do everything
from opt-in to joint venture (JV) partners programs that offer trade
of services or marketing to non-competing businesses to generate traffic.
Multi-merchant affiliates have large incomes but from hundreds of different
sites and have little time to truly focus on an advertiser. Niche affiliates
are relatively new but have strong presence within their niche. Webmaster
affiliates dominate top search results through their huge content sites.
Lastly, "scraper" affiliates do anything from building junk sites to
creating back-link machines.
Benefits
Affiliates bear the burdens of effort and time it costs an advertiser
to market their product and only requires payment for results. They
also eliminate an advertiser's need to find a website with related content
to list their banners. Affiliates can boast increased brand awareness
across the market and can successfully increase sales. Many large online
retailers claim affiliate marketing produces their highest return on
investment (ROI)2.
Pitfalls
Affiliates do not drive the targeted traffic an online advertising strategy
like organic search engine optimization does. For advertisers to really
benefit from an affiliate they need to find the elusive top 2% of super
affiliates, who are difficult to recruit. Many affiliates employ strategies
like spamming, back-links and viral materials to market your products.
The affiliate websites can then be penalized under search engine regulations
and the product may become associated with this bad publicity, dramatically
decreasing the customers trust in a product. Affiliate programs are
common in the retail and business-to-consumer market segment and almost
non-existent in the business-to-business online marketplace.
Affiliate Program Management
When working with an affiliate program it is essential to train, activate
and support it constantly. Affiliate program management can take a lot
of time and cost a lot of money just to make the program understand
an advertiser’s product and marketing needs. Once the affiliate
begins it also takes a lot of time to constantly communicating with
the affiliate in order to produce desired the results.
1Affiliate Classroom, Inc. 2006”
2Affiliate Classroom, Inc. 2006”
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