(6 minute read)

In previous series of blog posts, I have explained the various methods of building visitor traffic to a website by tapping into the power of the search engine. In these posts, I have outlined the various aspects of Search Engine Marketing, from an introduction of the concepts to SEO, optimisation techniques, PPC, and programmatic advertising.

In the post immediately preceding this, I explained the role of external link building to attract visitor traffic. I continue on that theme to expand upon Affiliate Marketing in this blog.

Affiliate Marketing

This is a type of Performance based marketing where professional marketers external to the company are paid for promoting a company’s goods and services in return for compensation. Affiliate marketers are professional marketers. Building relationships with them is like having your own professional sales force. They can be incredibly useful to a business in many ways. They:

  • Generate referrals and sales leads
  • Work as an external sales team, outsourced marketers
  • Provide greater visibility and awareness to your business
  • Expand audience and customer reach for your business
  • Generate targeted responses, sales leads, search, and referrals
  • Provide cost efficiencies

Types of Affiliate Marketers 

  • Content producers (rating, reviews, ranking, comparison sites)
  • Coupons, cashback and voucher sites, and deal offers
  • Data-feed driven sites
  • Domain oriented affiliates
  • Paid search
  • Remarketing / retargeting specialists and solutions
  • Email marketers
  • Loyalty affiliates
  • Mobile oriented affiliates
  • Opinion leaders and influencers
  • Speakers and educators
  • Pay per call publishers
  • Social media publishers
  • Video marketers

Factors to Consider

While deciding to hire a link or external affiliate to generate additional traffic to your website, it is good to carry out research on your competitors, customers, the type of tracking you want across devices, and whether the same objective can be achieved by using in-house software.

Finance and budgets may also be an issue as affiliates are paid on various commission and attribution models. Commission models work on ‘per’ calculation. Popular commission models include:

CPA – Cost Per Action

CPS – Cost Per Sale

CPC – Cost Per Click

Fixed cost – a flat fee.

Less popular ones include:

CPM – Cost Per Mile or Cost Per Thousand

CPI – Cost Per Impression

PPCALL – Pay Per Call

CPV/I – Cost Per View / Cost Per Interaction

Breakeven calculations will have to be done to decide this depending on the average sale price. Low price items where margin of profits are low may depend on generating a high number of views, impressions and clicks to attain conversion while high margin, high profit items may rely on fewer views but will attract the high-intention searcher, those who are likely to click on an ad with the intention of buying rather than just browsing or wasting time, thus increasing chances of conversion.

When a sale is made online, it is possible to track the ‘clickstream’ pathway accurately to determine at what point a sale has actually occurred. A website visitor may visit a site numerous times, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through third party links like clicking on a social media link or paid ad or email, before making a sale. By identifying the exact point at which conversion was done, attributions can be decided in order to determine commission beneficiary.

Attribution models work on first click, last click, linear, u-shaped etc.

Affiliates are a powerful source of sales and online traffic and can be especially useful for small businesses that hope to generate online traction and build digital presence.

If you want to continue to learn about traffic building using Social Media, click here…