Affiliate marketing is not a specific online marketing channel

It’s a school of thought and a business model. Affiliates are those people that are willing to promote your product and invest their own time and money, with the only guarantee that they’ll make money when you do. They’re paid on what’s called a Cost per Action / Cost per Lead / Cost per Sale basis, so they only profit when they’ve sold your product.

Because of its performance based nature, the best in this industry can make a lot of money. That’s why a numerous amount of innovative and very successful online marketers choose to make their money through affiliate marketing. The best thing about this model? These people are available and willing to partner with you, as long as you give them a reason to do so!

Affiliate programs traditionally consist of three layers:

• the advertiser, the company wanting to promote a product;
• the network, takes care of finding affiliates and tracking their sales;
• the affiliate (often called publisher) who promotes and sells the advertiser’s products.

This three layered solution works reasonably well in most cases. There’s only one big problem though: there’s no communication between the advertiser and affiliates, let alone the advertiser’s online marketing agency. As a result, many companies have successful affiliate marketing campaigns, and successful search marketing campaigns. But they have never thought about combining the two, to improve results even further.

It might even be the case that, while ROI is good for both, you could have considerable improvements if you decided to eliminate the cases in which you are competing with your own marketing efforts, for instance, bidding on the same keywords in AdWords.

That’s where affiliate management comes into play: it helps you to make sure you’re combining all your different marketing methods into one online marketing program, instead of competing ones.

Because we do this for a number of clients we meet plenty of good affiliates, and we just might be able to help you find those top affiliates your campaign is currently lacking.

Key Takeaways

• Affiliate marketing allows you to partner with the best and the brightest online marketers.
• Affiliate marketing is NOT a channel, it’s a way of paying affiliates. As such, you have to prevent channel cannibalization.
• Affiliate management can also help you find new top affiliates, immediately boosting your affiliate program’s performance.

So, how can we help you?

Think there’s more money in your affiliate marketing program? Contact us and let us quote you on affiliate management!