There’re a myriad of tactics that online business owners can employ to drive targeted traffic to their websites, but the most cost-effective one is undeniably that of “building an army of affiliates”.

This can be achieved by implementing what’s called an affiliate program. An affiliate program is undoubtedly the best way to increase website exposure, sales and profits.

For business owners, if you sell products that have a medium-to-high profit margin via the internet, you’ll be much more profitable and successful if you start implementing an in-house, two-tier affiliate program for reasons which I’ll delineate in a moment.

Affiliate Program Defined

What’s an affiliate program?

An affiliate program is a marketing initiative, a sort of performance-based advertising, whereby the affiliate promotes the merchant’s products/services, and in return and depending on the type of program, the affiliate receives a commission from, or shares revenue with the merchant for delivering sales, leads or traffic to the merchant’s websites. The affiliate can be paid a flat fee or a percentage of the transaction.

It’s a mutually beneficial business relationship, and is also commonly termed as associate, reseller, referral, or partner program. A case in point is Amazon.com which is amongst the first to launch an affiliate program on the internet.

How Does An Affiliate Program Work?

In a typical affiliate program, affiliates normally promote the merchant’s products/services by placing graphic links, text links and/or banners from their websites. They also advertise in ezines, send endorsement letters to their list of opt-in subscribers and customers via emails and/or autoresponders to drive traffic to the merchant’s websites.

The merchant leads the referred visitors through the selling process, closes the sale, processes the payment, fulfills the order and handles all customer service issues. The merchant also tracks the affiliates who send him the traffic via an affiliate software. If a sale is closed, the merchant calculates and pays the commission to the affiliates as agreed.

Types of Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs can be broadly categorized into various types as delineated below, and they can be either single-tier or two-tiers.

You can also either implement and manage the affiliate program yourself or outsource it to third party managers such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, etc. My suggestion is that you run your own affiliate program in-house as it is more cost-effective and profitable to you in the long run. By running your affiliate program in-house, you’ll do away with the start-up costs and percentage of revenue to be paid to third party affiliate program managers.

1. Pay-Per-Impression

Pay-Per-Impression is a type of affiliate program where the affiliate is paid by impressions. Everytime a banner or link is displayed to a visitor at the affiliate’s website, it is counted as an impression. The affiliate is normally paid a few cents per visitor, and the commission is calculated based on per 1000 impressions or CPM.

2. Pay-Per-Click

In this type of affiliate program, the affiliate is paid everytime a visitor clicks on the links or banners displayed at the affiliate’s website through to the merchant’s website. The compensation to the affiliate normally ranges from a few cents to a few dollars per click.

3. Pay-Per-Lead

As the name implies, the affiliate is compensated by every lead it generates for the merchant such as a visitor filling-up a form at the affiliate’s website.

4. Pay-Per-Sale

For this type of affiliate program, the affiliate is only paid when a sale is closed. This is the most cost-effective and profitable type of affiliate program and is the one that I recommend for reasons as delineated below.

Benefits of Affiliate Program

1. Increased Brand Awareness

An affiliate program will increase your brand awareness. Building your brand requires mass exposure, and as such, an affiliate program is ideal because of your network of affiliates. As your name, logo, and products are being promoted by your affiliates all over the internet, it inevitably increases your mindshare and brand awareness.

Amazon.com is a good example. It builds its brand identity initially via its affiliate program. Amazon.com is able to do so because of its vast network of affiliates. Its ten of thousands of affiliates is more than willing to promote its products because it benefits them as well in terms of the perceived credibility by associating with and promoting Amazon.com’s products.

2. Higher Search Engine Ranking

Search engines place great importance on the quality as well as the number of websites that link to you in determining your website ranking. A well designed affiliate program will dramatically increase your search engine link popularity because of the number of affiliates who link to you. This in turn will boost your ranking resulting in more traffic to your website.

In addition, with greater visibility in the search engines, both organic and paid listings, your brand identity will be further enhanced.

3. Extremely Low Advertising Costs and Risk

Your advertising costs is limited to what you pay to your affiliates when a sale is closed. Your affiliates literally do all the marketing and bear all the costs of advertising. Even when they spend money on advertising promoting your products and not making any sale, it doesn’t costs you a dime because they’re only paid on performance, that is, only when a sale is closed.

Therefore, it naturally follows that your risk is also extremely low. Your risks is only limited to the cost of your affiliate software and your time.

4. Increased Leads and Sales

An afffiliate program can literally grow your leads and sales exponentially. This is especially so with a 2-tier affiliate program when affiliates begin to recruit sub-affiliates. The increase in the volume of visitors to your website will give your website conversions a further boost. That means sales, with next to no effort on your part. Sales you might never have made without your affiliates referring them to you.

Furthermore, you can profit from these customers by selling to them over and over again with back-end sales. You’ve indeed gained additional customers for life, not forgetting that your affiliates themselves are also your potential customers.

As you can see, an in-house managed, two-tier affiliate program is undeniably one of the most cost-effective and profitable traffic generation tactic for both big and small businesses.

Think about this…

… You simply can’t lose because you don’t invest much money up front except for your time and the cost of the affiliate software which in most cases is rather low, and which you can easily make it back within a very short period of time.

Instituting an affiliate program is definitely one of the most powerful ways of marketing online, and is undoubtedly also a win-win relationship for the merchant and its affiliates.

About the Author

Copyright 2005 by Larry Lim, MarketingSphere.com

Larry Lim, a Singaporean, is the Founder of MarketingSphere.

A marketing strategist, Larry dishes out highly effective marketing strategies, tactics and tips that will enable you to start and grow your business on the Internet.

To read more of Larry Lim’s articles, visit his Internet Marketing Strategy and Article Search Engine Directory websites.

The first important factor- I will start with a problem everyone can relate to. That we have to keep going back to all the sites we have exchanged links with, to check if our link is still there or ahs been removed intentionally or otherwise. It’s a big waste of time. We should consider subscribing to the software, which automates the process to an extent and gives us intimation if someone removes our link from their site. It saves us from a major headache forever. It’s the first thing one should invest in as and when budget permits.

Point Two: Always accept and request link exchange with sites with a similar theme as yours. Google and other Search Engine Robots give a lot of weight to relevancy. If your site is dedicated to online education’s theme, don’t encourage pharmaceutical links. It may not help.

Point Three: If you are placing a link exchange request or accepting one with a site which is not related to the main theme of your site or is indirectly related to it, in such a case make sure that these sites have special pages and categories related to your theme. And also make sure they have placed your link on these pages. Likewise, you should also have pages which have links pertaining to their theme. Mixed-Miscellaneous kind of a page helps none. Gambling link on Pharmacy page – who will it benefit? What kind of target audience do you think will visit this kind of a page?

Point Four: When you send link details (i.e. URL, Anchor Text and Description) make sure your anchor tag has your main keywords in it. If your link can be placed on a page which has at least one of your keywords in their Title Tag and Keywords, it works best. This kind of a page will move up the search engine faster. And so will your site.

Point Five: Three way linking is acceptable. The best way to get one way liking without paying for it is through articles. Write articles and submit them to Article banks, and sites dedicated to articles exclusively. When people use your content they give you credit for it by placing your link on their site. This works like magic if done in the right manner.

Keep these five points in mind while exchanging links. These are small things which webmasters don’t bother about. Not realizing these small things can make a big difference. As webmasters, who are serious about making money online or doing home business let us not ignore it.

The author is Purva Mewar
webmaster of two Work at Home Business websites: http://www.yesearnfromhome.com and http://www.work-at-home-earn-extra-income.com

Now before you run off thinking you’ve read about the following tactic before, hang on!

This article assumes you have come cross one of my other articles on articles. And that you know what syndication is and why it is important at it’s most basic level for high rankings.

But now I want to show you a trick to get high rankings for search terms that you currently struggle with on your own site by optimizing SOMEONE ELSE’s site for that term.

Here we go!

There are other sites that have the traffic and rankings you WISH you had, right? Well, syndicating content can put YOU on those sites and if you are smart about it, you can optimize those popular sites pages with your search terms to get high rankings for that particular page.

Why on earth would you do that?

Well, for one, it is faster to get ranked higher on a site that already has a high ranking in the search engines. Your article could focus on a term like I am doing in this one.

Have you seen a repetitious, but hopefully not obnoxious, term in this article? I am using “high rankings” on purpose. I
don’t have a high ranking for that term on any of my sites and I want to use OPP to get a higher ranking for my link – which LINKS BACK TO MY SITE at the bottom of this article!

Confused? Don’t be. Basically, all I am doing is using the popularity of very large sites that house my articles every time I write to get attention of surfers looking for content based on less competitive but desirable keywords.

It’s a known fact that Google spiders more frequently on sites that are large, established, and that change frequently. I can have an article showing up on a Google search in the top ten for a key phrase in as little as 1 day at times.

On a new site the same article would take weeks sometimes to get into Google and even then, if my pagerank isn’t very high yet, I will STILL rank lower than the same page on an established site.

Higher rankings can be achieved in so MANY ways and this is just another angle for writers who have little patience for waiting on the engines to find THEM.

Syndicating keyword optimized articles is how I go out and find the search engines wherever they are spidering right now. This is also how I submit all my sites to the search engines. I just syndicate my articles.

This is basically like casting into a different, more active part of the pond you are fishing in. If the fish ain’t bitin’ where you’re fishing (your own site) then go fish another part of the lake with OPP!

Jack Humphrey is the CEO of http://WebFoxMedia.com, a marketing consulting firm dedicated to small and large businesses looking for higher rankings and more traffic and exposure. We also write keyword optimized articles for you!

You will probably get the perception that they know what they are doing and are very successful online. Now what if you were that person showing your name along with your business, phone number and e-mail? You will start receiving e-mails and phone call from people asking you to help mentor them and help them make money. Its alot easier to market when people come to you. For an example of this I will show you two different ads for different programs and lead captures that I promote here and here.

As you can see, they catch your attention as your clicking through all the exchanges and you have the chance to e-mail me. Would you rather check out the business I am promoting rather than the others? Especially since you keep seeing the same ad and the same name at the the top!

If you really want to stand out I would seriously think about purchasing the clip board ad as its only a one time $4.95 admin fee and $1.95 a month. I will tell you that this clip board ad program has literally made me thousands of dollars. You can visit the site Clip Board Ads .

In addition to standing out from the crowd you need to generate leads! yes leads! The best way to generate leads is to create a lead capture page promising them some type of valuable information. All they need to do is submit their name and e-mail address and your auto responder will automatically follow up with a series of messeges containing your promise to them.

You not only will sell your information to your subscribers but you will also be able to shoot them random e-mails outside of your automatic messege series relating the same information. There are a number of paid autoresponders out there but if your budget is small I would think about using emailaces for free.

Read the full article with active links at my blog!

Author: Corey Morehouse
Freewebbizsolutions.com

For webmasters, your goal is probably to achieve certain page rank or link popularity for your site. That is good. It is even better if someone else can help you do that. To increase your link popularity there are two types of sites that can help you achieve that; web directories submission and niche article directories.

Web directories let you submit your website profile and descriptions mostly for free. They act as internet yellow pages where each website is categorized according to your website content. You can gain one link per one listing at most web directories.

Niche article directories let you submit your content. Their services are also free. At the end of the submission form, there is a resource box that lets you describe your website and businesses with a link to it. To me, this is one of the most wonderful ways of gaining back links. For one, you can get more than one links if you write more than one article. Having 100 articles to submit? Then, you can gain a 100 back links from just one site. If you submit to ten different article directories, then you can get at least 1000 back links. With web directories, you need to submit to 1000 web directories to get that much back links.

Having said that, which one is a more effective back link? One link from a web directory or one link from an article directory? The more effective back link is of course the link that comes from an article directory. This is because you submit your content to article directories, which might help viewers finding information they need. Once they read and like your article, they are most likely to click on the link and visit your website. Meanwhile, web directories merely publish information about your site which might or might not help the viewers.

Do you have to pay to publish your content at another site? Not at all. Most article directories do not charge submission fee. But as they gain in popularity, they might charge a submission fee in the future, just like web directories. Here is your chance to get 1000 back links or more if you have 100 articles to distribute.

To help you reach your goal, Novice Investing now allows you to distribute your finance/investing content for free at our article submission service. Meanwhile you can still list your site for free at our web directory service.