Internet Marketing School

Blogging seems to be the new buzz word in the online marketing word, merchant sites, large community sites even information sites are now using blogs as a means of leveraging off the search engines needs for new and fresh unique content. Personally I’m a big advocate for Blogs with several of my own sites, one (a hobby) is www.dj-music.org.uk.

As both an Affiliate Manager and a small part time affiliate, I’ve had to learn everything there is to know about online marketing in order to do my job of finding new affiliates, working with both affiliate and clients, and planning affiliate programs. There are several ways affiliates can build successful streams of income from online marketing.

• Google Adsense - this simply requires you to signup to google and place adsense on your site, you get paid per click.
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising - this is basically using Google Ad Words as an advertising platform, in some cases affiliates don’t even need a website for this kind of affiliate marketing, however, they are subject to more restrictions than affiliates with websites.
• Websites - this is that bread and butter of affiliates and many affiliates have several sites. Sites can be as simple or as complex as you like and there are sites like Squidoo.com and Wordpress.com that allow you to build affiliate sites for no money down (of course there is a bit of a trade off here).
• Offline – this is usually only common with casino and gaming affiliates who will distribute flyers or CDs with the Casinos program setup preinstalled with their affiliate link.
• Social Network Sites - smaller affiliates tend to use this as a way of marketing their affiliate links, they do this by posting on various forums, blogs and other sites, embedding their link after writing a little bit of content, suffice to say this is considered spammy and unethical and most forums police to prevent this kind of spam.
• Email – affiliate create or rent lists, and send out bulk mailers to the subscriber base. Due to Spam laws, email marketing is a very touch area, and there are many restricting that are put in place to prevent spam emails.

Now that you’ve seen several of the ways affiliate marketers work, its time consider the mechanics of affiliate marketing.

Clients or merchants are sites with products to sell, affiliate management agencies create affiliate programs for the merchant and affiliate networks provide the tracking technology and affiliate recruitment, affiliates then select the programs they wish to run and place links on their site, from here, all information relating to a sale is tracked by the network, and the affiliate is paid a commission for each sale, lead or action performed by a consumer as a result of clicking through an affiliate’s link. This model is called CPA (cost per acquisition).

This valuable article was contributed by Ken Cheung (United Kingdom). Ken Cheung is an Affiliate manager for Altogether Ads (www.altogetherads.com), a UK based affiliate network, which is part of Altogether Digital (www.altogetherdigital.com) a full service digital agency and member of The Engine Group (www.theenginegroup.com).

Published on the IMS community blog portal by the Internet Marketing School team.