by: Diana Barnum
The amount of money spent on online advertising continues to grow annually. In fact, US Internet ad revenues alone totaled roughly $16.9 billion in 2006, and this amount was up 35% from 2005, according to the “Internet Advertising Revenue Report” from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), as reported by *Emarketer.com.
This large amount of ad spending is great news for affiliate marketers. It means sellers will be spending even more dollars online to push their products. And the outlook is great for the future as well when you consider the facts*:
Over 49 percent of US advertisers are spending their ad dollars on the Internet.
The total amount spent has been increasing each year since 2002.
US ad spending is expected to grow to more than $36 billion in 2011.
What This Means for Affiliate Marketers
The majority or 81 percent of affiliate marketing programs use what is called revenue share or cost per sale to pay their affiliate marketers. Most of the other sellers use some type cost per action or CPA method, as discussed more in depth at **Wikipedia.
In a nutshell, CPA advertisers pay for impressions that result in sales or from some other form of targeted activity that’s tracked and verified. For instance, a company might pay per lead when one of your leads clicks on their form (linked via your affiliate link) and fills out all of the information which in turn will be verified by the seller to make sure the entry isn’t fake. If it pans out, you get paid for the lead.
The bottom line is that regardless of which type of affiliate program you choose, more money is being spent by advertisers which means you will have more opportunities to make more money. Definitely a win-win there!
Now just as there is with nearly anything else, there is a dark side to affiliate marketing. So take a peak at some of the negative side to get a clearer picture of what you may be up against before proceeding.
The Dark Side of Affiliate Marketing
Some of the aspects of affiliate marketing can get downright ugly. Any of the following may cause issues for your business and you:
Affiliate accounts may be de-activated without your knowledge if you have short periods of inactivity. Not only that, once de-activated, the accounts cannot be re-activated. Hence all your affiliate links become useless overnight. All your hard work, time and money setting up campaigns and promotions vanish virtually overnight.
If you decide you still want to pursue that affiliate program who gave you the boot above, note it gets worse. You now need to open an entirely new account and use a different email address. That can translate into, “Good-bye” to any reporting, accounting and other types of organization you had in place with accounts all using the same email address, and it can mean, “Hello!” to more spam, set up and other tracking issues. So reconsider your plans before taking action and make sure to use your time well.
Some affiliate programs have more than two tiers and thus this fact turns them into MLM or multi-level marketing plans. Now some of these multi-tiered organizations won’t admit as such to you, and others may try to gloss over the facts about how you need to recruit others under you like a pyramid scheme. So before you jump into any program with more than two tiers, do your homework and check with the Federal Trade Commission at
http://www.ftc.gov and with your state and local governments to see if the program and organization contacting you it is legitimate, legal and has no complaints against them.
Unfortunately, flaws in technology and mankind can result in program performance being reported incorrectly. This can be bad for you because your click-throughs and sales may not even be registering with the affiliate program, meaning you get no pay. So always test and track. Monitor your progress. And if things aren’t working, stop participating and move on to something else.
When you refer your leads to other people’s products and services, you may be losing out on plenty of other sales – back end sales, up sells, follow up attempts to close more, etc. Avoid passing people along by setting up systems to capture your leads info first and continuing communications afterwards for the long-term growth of your business.
How to Jump In There to Make This Opportunity Work
What you need to do to make the most out of any affiliate marketing efforts, is to begin by first learning all you can about the latest in affiliate marketing techniques and strategies in order to get up to speed with the latest information. You need to learn about popular affiliate marketing programs out there today. And you need to learn about various methods of affiliate marketing that work to find which ones work best for your projects and you personally.
And the buck doesn’t stop there. Anyone who’s been doing business on the Internet for awhile will tell you that technology and the Internet grow, develop and change constantly. So what works today may not and probably won’t work tomorrow.
For example, in the earlier days of Internet marketing, you could simply toss up a website and be listed fairly quickly. Forget about pay per click campaigns and many other marketing avenues. But alas, those days are gone with all the competition out there, all the people online, all the millions and billions of web pages today.
Popular Affiliate Marketing Programs
Some of the more popular affiliate marketing programs today are Clickbank.com, Linkshare.com and those offered via 1Shoppingcart.com sellers. If you have plenty of traffic and sales with no concern about issues mentioned above where if there is a short time delay in activity, your account is de-activated, Commission Junction may also offer opportunities for you at cj.com.
Note that the Commission Junction program can be very difficult for many to simply sign up. Fact is, there is nothing simple about their sign up process, and you’ll probably be rejected several times until you complete their form to their liking. You will be called a publisher, too, so don’t let that throw you for a loop right off.
Popular affiliate marketing programs have some of the following points in common:
- The affiliate programs are free to join.
- The program offers training or at least some basic information to help you get started.
- The program offers marketing help – banners ads, text ads, site with gracphis and copywriting…anything & everything can help!
- There is customer support to help you in a timely manner, usually via a Help Desk.
- There are tracking and monitoring tools in place.
- Payment comes at a good pace (i.e. regularly during the month and after only a couple sales so that you’re not waiting for $10,000 or more in sales over 20 years or something). And payment also comes in an acceptable format (check or Paypal, for example .
Popular Methods of Affiliate Marketing that Work
Test, track, monitor ROI –the tweak SEO (Search engine optimization), website content, etc.
Set up your own blog and use it to post about your products and services
Set up your own site and use it as a home base for your affiliate marketing. Link it up with your blog, your review pages, your articles, etc.
Set up a review site & invite interaction
Set up a rating site & invite interaction
Add a forum, chat room or link to popular ones on your site for interaction.
Incorporate digital images, audio and video with your marketing mix
Use autoresponders and leads capture forms to generate leads: offer freebies, reports and guides to go with your products, learning series, ezine, articles, news, file sharing and more.
Write and submit articles to online directories and publishers and offline publishers. marketing
Press releases – submitted online and offline
Postcard marketing – sent via online methods and offline
Conduct regular learning series (via autoresponders, workshops, teleseminars, podcasts, videos, locally, at industry events…)
Focus on offline marketing, too: direct marketing campaigns, B2B telemarketing, fundraisers, community events, trade shows, etc.
Ask for 2 tiers or more profit or other benefits from the seller (like free membership or product samples or guides to include in your reviews, etc.)
Start your own affiliate marketing program and recruit your own affiliate marketers.
Learn about what ‘super affiliates’ and what it takes to become one. Then pump up your affiliate marketing!
Now the rest is up to you. Opportunity is there. It’s knocking at your door. It’s time to take action and get moving!
*Emarketer.com (2007). Online Ad Spending Hits New Record. Emarketer.com. May 25, 2007. Retrieved from
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1004963&src=article1_newsltr **Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Affiliate marketing. Retrieved from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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