Understanding the nuts and bolts of affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is basically an extension of the traditional marketing promotion technique adapted to the virtual Internet marketplace where companies sell products and services online to their customers. To date, one of the most successful and effective affiliate marketing programs is the one employed by Amazon – its affiliate program has generated a great source of income for the company and its affiliates.

In an affiliate marketing program, a merchant (or business) grants sub-merchants (affiliates) permission to promote their products or services; In return, the affiliate gets a percentage of each sale generated through their efforts (the website links). The affiliate is responsible for sending specific visitors to a vendor to purchase the product, which in turn generates the sales from which they get commissions. This is one of the main reasons webmasters affiliate their sites with complementary products and services.

So how does a potential sub-marketer (affiliate) benefit from affiliate marketing?

Although there is no guarantee of success if you are involved in the online affiliate marketing business, there are a number of fundamental marketing principles that you must observe and follow in order to earn your commissions.

1. Customize the content of your website to complement the affiliate products and services that you market. You can earn more commissions promoting goods and services if what you sell and promote complements the content on your website. This way, you get targeted traffic that is more likely to respond positively and buy what you offer rather than simply placing a banner or text link that is unrelated to your content.

Hypothetically, if you are looking for Pomeranians and you visit a website with the relevant information and you saw a banner for the Hummer vehicle customization kit, it is doubtful that you would even be interested in clicking the banner, right?

2. In general, specialized websites perform better compared to general purpose sites when it comes to generating affiliate income streams due to their related content. A visitor visits a niche website for a specific reason (the content of the site), therefore they are more likely to be interested in complementary products and services related to the purpose of their visit. Success-to-sale conversion rates are considerably higher on websites that are affiliated with complementary products and services.

3. Make sure to insert your affiliate links directly into the content of your website. Embedding affiliate links directly into your web content guarantees higher response rates, which can definitely result in substantial income for affiliates.

4. Always use redirects when placing affiliate links in your content. You can easily do this by creating a redirect file, containing your affiliate link, ensuring that the page opens in a new browser window. This also provides protection for your links against affiliate hijacking to ensure that you are properly credited for your promotional efforts. Redirect scripts are available from scripting sites on the Internet.

Simply put, to stay one step ahead in the affiliate marketing program, you need to customize your website to fit; make sure you find complementary products and services that you can promote; embed your affiliate links directly into your web content and always use redirect scripts to protect your affiliate links from hijackers.

Simple? Yes, but neglecting simple, fundamental marketing techniques more often leads to failure rather than success and a steady stream of additional income.