Friday, December 28, 2007

Affiliate Marketing: A Cost-Effective Way to Advertise your Business

An affiliate program is a form of internet advertising that rewards marketers for driving traffic to a company's website and producing sales. The company gives its affiliates a personalised tracking link that the marketer can use in their promotions. This link enables the company to track where traffic and sales are coming from and pay their affiliates accordingly. Simply put, affiliate programs are about paying commissions to people who help you to make sales. This is not quite as easy as it sounds. Running an affiliate program has its ups and downs. It is very important to be armed with up to date information and technical know how if you are going to run such a program successfully and with the minimum stress. In this article we will look at the benefits of affiliate marketing as a tool for increasing your businesses profitability.. .

Here are some of the reasons why you should consider affiliate marketing as an effective way of advertising your business and products.
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1. Low cost

Running an affiliate program is very cost effective as you only pay your affiliates for the results that they produce. The affiliate bears most of the cost of promoting your product, you provide them with the necessary tools, such as banners and other promotional material. Of course, this arrangement is mutually beneficial, you get low cost advertising; your affiliates get the opportunity to make money from a product that they haven't had to spend time and money developing.

2. Affiliate programs produce unlimited income through leverage

When you have a paid job, your monthly income mainly relies on whether you go to work or not. With affiliate marketing, your affiliates do all of the work in getting traffic to your site. Once you have provided them with your ad copy and links you don't to lift a finger, especially if your product is a digital one. Although not everyone earns limitless amounts of money, running an affiliate marketing program greatly increases your chances.
Tip! Find A Good Product: It seems so simple people often overlook this crucial aspect of affiliate marketing. If people are clicking through from your page to your merchants page and they are not being converted.

4. Go worldwide

With affiliate marketing, you are dealing with a global market place. All you have to do is choose a niche product and prepare all the necessary tools for your affiliates to lead traffic from just about anywhere to your website.

5. Low risk

The main reason that so many internet companies rely on affiliate marketing is that the risks are relatively low. This is especially true for those with little money available to set aside for advertising. Affiliate marketing is just the way to do it.

6. No closing time

With affiliate marketing, your business works every single second of the day while targeting a worldwide market! What could be better than that?

Paul Winter has been marketing online for six years. He is the editor of ArticleBazaar.Net & ArticlesRus.Net.

Affiliate Marketing and PPC Beginners Guide

Affiliate marketing is taking the internet by storm it is turning paupers in to kings and with this article I will send you on your way to becoming a master of Affiliate marketing.

First of all affiliate marketing comes in all shapes and forms but has three main components, The Product you are marketing, the commission you are paid and how you market the product.

Firstly the products, there are a large range of products to choose but the choices I recommend are

Hellopharmacy.com -This online pharmacy has a large of range of Prescription drugs including the popular men's impotence drugs Cialis and Viagra; you get $20 on all first sales and $10 on re orders.

Commission Junction - Is similar to a middle man which handles a large range of affiliate products for different companies, you sign up and choose of literly tens of thousands of quality products, commissions can range from $1 to thousands of dollars.
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Clickbank is similar to Commission Junction but its product range is generally of lesser quality such as money making e-books and the like.

Now choosing your product can be a some what interesting experience but the best results are usually achieved by choosing a niche area where competition is less and choosing no more that two to three products at most.

Now generally commissions range all over the place that's why I recommend a pharmacy for a first try as it's quite good, but there are plenty of other areas, you just got to find them.

Now that you have chosen your product range it is time to market the product with PPC.

Pay per click it is what is says you pay per click, recommend that you try to budget for a loss at start and learn from it, try to be specific with your keywords. In the PPC arena you usually have to bid against other users
Tip! Some affiliate marketing programs will pay you for sending them quality 'leads'. A lead is usually considered a visitor that will either sign up for a service or purchase a product.

Google Adwords - Generally the biggest out there usually works.

Pageseeker/Roar - Produces quality clicks highly recommended.

GOclick - Have found lower quality clicks but generally cheaper.

It may take time to find the right niche and ppc advertising but if you can find the right balance, you'll be making money in no time.

Copyright Alexander Price 2006 All Rights Reserved

Alexander Price is an expert in Affialte Marketing and Online pharmacys.

If you want to sign up as an affilate at his website http://hellopharmacy.com/affiliates.php you are more than willing to do so.