Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a powerful and profitable online marketing strategy
Affiliate marketing is a powerful way to increase your profits. Its principle is very simple, an advert is created with a unique code which is linked to your website. This advert is hosted on another business’s website. When clicked the user is brought through to your website, this will generate a (pre-agreed) fee to your advert host website - otherwise known as your affiliate.
This is a similar concept as Pay Per Click but much more powerful because it gives you control as to the businesses you align with, in addition, you are able to link through to your online shop and offer greater incentives to companies, such as percentage of sale generated. This allows you to complement your business offer and theirs.
The right type of affiliate advert
A combination of 3 main types of affiliate advertisement work well. Review styles of advertising:
- hyperlinked text (in context of the page being read)
- static images with hyperlinks
- animated ‘flash’ banners
These adverts will only work well for you, if you have strategically researched your most appropriate websites to affiliate with, can manage your affiliate relationships and payment administration. Treating your affiliate as prized assets within your online business will benefit your business and encourage your affiliate to work harder in terms of promoting your business on their site.
As you increase your affiliations, your google pagerank will increase significantly and push your website higher up the search rankings. This makes it more attractive to other companies who will pay you a fee for your related traffic!
e-blueprint offer a monthly managed service that includes:
- negotiating with your target affiliates
- Up to 3 new banners per month of any type
- getting the best position on their site for your advert
- building a HTML pages and hyperlinked text for your affiliate
- Producing monthly reports to your accounts department to be sent out to your affiliates
Choosing the right strategy
Affiliate marketing is a strategic tool that should be taken into consideration when developing your e-blueprint and set your company on the road to becoming a profitable online business.
Depending on your business and the brands that you are related too you will need to use a 3rd party affiliation company. e-blueprint have relationships with companies that relate to your industry and can help you manage these relationships as part of your strategy. If these companies aren’t right for your product its worth investing in developing and managing these relationships yourself and e-blueprint can develop this for.
The first major benefit of using e-blueprint’s affiliate program is that we offer three options to save you this expense:
i) A fixed rate for the management and administration of your program
ii) An affiliate program that can be integrated into your website, so you can manage your payments yourself
iii) A range of adverts that can be integrated into other business web pages.
Secondly, going through the major affiliation software companies, in general, you are restricted to banner advertisements. These may not be right for you or your customers as you may wish to integrate your advert within your content.
Businesses you affiliate with may be unhappy if your campaign is not managed correctly or they have difficulty with your software. Lets not forgot, when advertising on someone else’s website there is a responsibility to them, potentially you could be taking their hard earned traffic away them, so in order to provide the right incentives, your business relationship needs to be executed with the utmost professionalism, from administration of payments to management of the relationship. Offering a flashy banner advert may not always be the right tactic to get your potential affiliate to host your advert on their site. e-blueprint manage these issues for you by helping you approach the ‘right’ sort of websites with the right type of affiliate advert.
