Affiliate Marketing – A Beginner’s Guide

The aim of our affiliate marketing guide is to provide a general overview for small businesses that are new to this method of generating online sales.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is paying someone else to promote your products or services online.

When they generate a sale or enquiry for your business via their marketing efforts, you then pay them a pre-agreed commission.

Affiliate marketing is not suitable for all types of small business and a lot depends on your existing profit margins. After all there’s no point in getting a surge in new business via affiliate marketing and not making any profit on it.

What are the different types of affiliate marketing?

Generally speaking there are 4 main types of affiliate marketing;

• Pay per click – you pay every time someone clicks through to your site
• Pay per lead – you pay for every lead generated by affiliate marketing
• Pay per action – you pay for each download or installation
• Pay per sale – you pay a commission on the order value generated

The best method for your business will largely depend on what you want people to do when they visit your website.

How can affiliate marketing help my business?

Affiliate marketing can be invaluable for small businesses that don’t have the time, budget, or skills to generate online sales themselves.

It’s like having your own sales team out on the internet but only having to pay them when they achieve your desired result, whether that’s an online sale or request for more information.

Affiliate marketing can help you grow your online sales and widen your reach without wasting money, as you only pay for results.

How does it work?

There are many affiliate marketing platforms online such as Click Bank which bring affiliate marketing people together with companies looking for people to promote their products or services.

One of the main advantages of using such a service is that the company that brings the two parties together will arrange accurate tracking and payments so that there are no arguments about what business has come from where and how much your affiliates are owed.

If you liked this article you may also want to read my top 10 affiliate marketing tips

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 11th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Guides for Beginners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.