Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a web based marketing practice and can be described as earning revenue from third parties who feature your content or adverts on their site.

Often in the past, affiliate marketing was seen as a ‘quick-win’. Seemingly little time or investment was required, the opinion of many, was that you could add some well placed banners and buttons and the revenue would be rolling in. Whilst this may have rung true in the early days, it’s no longer the case. However, in the past 12 months affiliate revenue has increased by 45%* taking the total value of online sales generated through this channel to more than £.3.13* billion, so it is still a big potential growth area, you just need to be smarter in your approach. (figures from econsultancy.com market overview 2007)

How should you approach affiliate marketing?

There are really two routes:

1. You can use an affiliate network This method is often used for recruiting and managing a large number of affiliates. The network will help you to recruit, track, and manage affiliates. You will need to supply the network with the necessary creatives, and liaise with the network to maintain performance. However affiliate networks often make the process less time consuming and more effective with their expertise.
2. You can recruit and manage your own affiliates You may choose to do this for ‘super- affiliates’ or those who you believe have the potential, or who are already performing particularly well. As you can adopt a highly personalized strategy for co-marketing it also allows greater flexibility. The greater use of integrated technology such as white labeling your product for that affiliate will enhance performance and subsequent revenue generated by that partnership.

Tips for successful affiliate marketing...

You may choose to use one or both of the above routes as they each have their merits in generating additional revenue for your business. Tips for successful affiliate marketing include...

• Partner with complementary but not competing sites
• Ensure all links are tracked and that you are clear on what is being measured
• Explore all commercial avenues for partnerships, pay per sale and loyalty programmes are two of the most popular and effective
• Provide different choices for your affiliates to implement, this may be banners, buttons, or could be providing a white label option for a partner to use.
• Maintain ongoing dialogue between yourself and your partners, they may have some good ideas as to how, working together you can increase revenues

As the market continually changes, the avenues for affiliate marketing are still expanding. The growth in Social networking sites such as Facebook will lead to different opportunities and abilities to target your audience. The use of technology may also change the requirements for affiliate marketing. The growth of the mobile arena has led to companies such as such as Silverjet and Hostelworld creating sites purely for mobile consumption. Are you ready to supply mobile options for your affiliates? If not, you may want to consider the revised approach you will need to take over the coming months.

The only certainty is that affiliate marketing will continue to change and evolve just as the web is itself, but you need to consider now, what technology you are going to use to suit these ever changing requirements.