Internet Marketing School

Affiliate Marketing is a sales and marketing based model in Internet Marketing for monetizing a website; though there are alternative methods as well:

CPM/Display Advertising/Tenancy
If you consider how a magazine makes money by charging a flat monthly or annual fee to place a advertising creative in their magazine, this is how this form of site monetization works.

Cost Per Click (CPC)
This is where the website charges the advertiser based on each click, this is similar to Google AdSense usually the website is part of a network of sites or subscribes to a central advertising provider such as Yahoo or Miva.

Download
Usually only an option for Casino and game related products, it works in the same was as CPC.

Pay Per View
Similar to display and Cost-Per-Click, in that the site gets paid each time a creative is played, such as a video.

HOW TO GET TRAFFIC?
Regardless of the monetization strategy there is one core dilemma for any website – HOW TO GET TRAFFIC. The answer is simple, but the execution strategy is very complex. How to get traffic? By marketing. To answer this question more succinctly, we need to take into account a whole expanse of factors and skills that affiliate marketers use.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
For websites, this is the principle school that helps to bring in more traffic, the goal is simply to get to the top position in page 1 of a search engine in the shortest time and stay there, for a selection of high traffic keywords

Keyword Research: This is the most important part of online marketing, its both an art and a science and requires you to understand fully online users searching behaviour, for example, people tend to search not using grammatical language, using a tool I found the following example of high volume search terms people have used:

• affiliate marketing an = search volume: 11,430/month
• business online marketing promotion internet affiliate = search volume: 630/month

Keyword research includes selecting the right domains, optimizing for the right keywords and finding keywords and key phrases to optimize for. This lead to niche marketing where affiliate focus on specific niches such as punk music London, rather than music for example.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing: Affiliates can use this in three ways, direct marketing to the merchant site, marketing to a landing page that converts to merchant page or finally as a strategy for marketing to their own affiliate site directly, being good at PPC involves being good with keyword research.

Offline Marketing: Naturally this is a factor, and larger affiliate sites use this when they have budget, however its not limited to large budgets and TV commercials, it can also be done on a budget, classified ads in magazines and news papers for example, business cards and flyers.

Creating Your Own Affiliate Program: Larger sites tend to use this as a strategy to gain more users however for average affiliate sites, this is considers a taboo strategy, after all, why market someone else’s site instead of yours especially if you’re both marketing the same merchants?

This is just a broad over view of the elements that help to make a good affiliate site, as we explore each in detail, you’ll see how they fit together and work together to make a highly successful affiliate site.

This valuable article was contributed by Ken Cheung (United Kingdom). Ken Cheung is a Part time affiliate (www.dj-music.org.uk, www.bloggingnetwork.co.uk, www.affiliateblogger.co.uk) and 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).

Edited and published by the Internet Marketing School team.