Affiliate Programs

Afiliate Programs

Afiliate programs or associate programs are programs arranged by online merchants to attract visitors to their website. This online promotion or marketing method was made famous by the CEO of Amazon.com Mr. Jeff Bezos in 1996. It is great to have websites and it is particularly important if your business is an internet business also known as e-commerce or if the bulk of your business depends on the visitors who visit your website. However in order for you to tell the world that you exist and to drive traffic to your website you would need a good online marketing plan that would be able to give you your desired results. .

To make an afiliate program a success there must be three parties involved. They are the merchant, the affiliate and the customer. The merchant is the one who owns the website. The afiliate is the company or individual who has been granted to promote the websites and the customer or visitor is of course the person who visits the merchant's website..Afiliate programs are known to be one of the best online marketing strategies to get your website recognized and to get your business going. Merchants have designed several programs that involve afiliates who work on a specific commission to direct traffic to the merchant's website. These affiliates can be considered as the marketing partners or promoters of the merchants. .

The Afiliates can either create their own individual web page to promote the products and services of their merchants or just create a link directly to the merchant's website. They can even provide links that will permit prospective clients to download catalogues or price lists of products and services. Merchants also have the option to either run their own afiliate programs or hire the services of professionals to track the activities referred by their affiliates because it is up to the merchant to hire as many afiliates as he wishes. There are basically three types of afiliate programs where the affiliates can earn their commissions. They are pay per sale, pay per click and pay per lead programs. Pay per sale or cost per sale is when the afiliate manages to sell a product or service to a customer or when he manages to direct a customer to the merchant's site and ends with a sale. Pay per click or cost per click is when a visitor clicks on the merchants website through the promotional activities of the afiliate, and pay per lead or cost per lead is when a customer or visitor registers, subscribes or requests for information at the merchant's site through the promotional activities of the afiliate.

There are also other payment plans in certain afiliate programs like the two-tier program and the residual program. The two-tier program is just like multilevel marketing or network marketing where they earn commissions as per the existing afiliate programs, as well as from the leads that occur from their own site. Residual program is where the affiliate keeps earning a commission every time their lead purchases, visits or registers at a site. .

Everything said and done, the bottom line is that afiliate programs are the way to increase awareness, popularity and sales for an e-commerce website or any website for that matter. In fact it is also the preferred marketing tool for any merchant because unlike the traditional advertising methods, in these programs the merchant only needs to pay the affiliate when results are achieved!.

Article Published: Monday 28th August 2006