Your own lucrative Online business - Part 2, Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is the lifeblood of Online retailing. Affiliate Marketing is a win-win relationship between the Affiliate (the website owner) and the merchant (the Online retailer).

So how does Affiliate Marketing work and what are the advantages for each partner?

The Affiliate makes money selling the retailers products without the burden of buying stock. The merchant is making sales without marketing.

The question often asked is, "What is the point of Affiliates, why doesn't the customer just buy directly from the Merchant?". This is the difference between a good and bad Affiliate Marketing website. Some Affiliates simply duplicate the merchants product list onto their own site. This is bad... the Affiliate is competing with the merchant and getting in the way of the merchant's business. Affiliate websites like this are penalised by search engines and rarely successful.

A good habit to get into is putting yourself in the customer's shoes when reviewing progress. At each stage of your project, ask yourself, 'What is the benefit to the customer?'. If the customer can't see a benefit, don't expect to get their business..

One of the most successful Affiliate strategies is Niche Marketing. Rather than promote a merchant or entire product range, drill down and target a specific product. This can be done by reviewing a product or alternatively, write an article comparing a number of similar products. Include a link to buy at the end of the article. There are two advantages with this. Firstly, there is clearly a benefit for the customer. Secondly, Search Engines such as Google love well written content and will rank your Website better.

Few merchants have the resources to run an Affiliate operation and rely on a Network.

To be continued...

 

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