An affiliate program is a way to set up a marketing channel for your business that only pays when you actually make a sale. You only pay for the action you get from your advertising spend, that sounds pretty cool huh?
Essentially an affiliate program is the Internet version of commission based sales spotters fee. If a customer is referred to a business who then performs a transaction, then the business pays a commission for the referral to the owner of the web site you sent them.
Amazon has probably the best-known affiliate program. (they actually call it an ‘associate’ program) As a web site owner you can refer your site visitors to any product on Amazon and if they buy it you get a commission on the sale price.
There are now thousands of individual affiliate programs, affiliate merchant networks and affiliate marketers who derive serious income from driving sales to other peoples businesses.
An affiliate program can be set up to suit any business or sales process as there are several types of programs that you can establish including pay per click thru (not so popular these days), pay per lead and pay per sale.
The top affiliate marketers can be a clandestine bunch of people but they seek out affiliate programs that convert well, pay a good commission level, and offer a recurring percentage of the value of customer purchases. (i.e lifetime commissions) Finding a ‘super’ affiliate and getting them working on promoting your product offering can send your results north very quickly.
Of course there is never a free lunch, and setting up an affiliate program is no different. To be successful you will need to allocate time and resources to developing marketing materials for affiliates to utilise and it is highly recommended to have a person dedicated to finding and keeping the top affiliate marketers working on prompting your offers.