Do you want to increase the traffic of your online shop? One of the best ways to do it is to allow thousands of webmasters to put your link, banners, coupons and product data feeds on their web site for FREE. You don’t need to pay them anything until someone actually buys something from your Online Stor. This is called affiliate marketing, or performance based marketing(one kind of link building methods). It is a way that allows your Online Store to be advertised all over the World Wide Web for Free while branding your domain name or trade name. Only when somebody buys, that’s when you pay!
While in PPC (Pay-Per-Click) markeing, you should pay for each click if you make a sale or not. And for signing up for a $5000 banner advertising campaign, you must really know your stuff in the area of testing and tracking.
As your affiliates are the ones who do all the promotion, Performance Based Marketing is one of the best risk-free ways of increasing traffic to your online store. There are two considerations for Online merchants when thinking about setting up an Affiliate Marketing system.
* Setting up and managing the affiliate tracking and payment system.
* Recruiting an army of affiliates.
Although it’s good to say that affiliate marketing will increase traffic to your Onlne Store, the system need to be setup and running bug-free before any of this can happen. Many Online Stores fail each year because they have not set up this system properly in a way that works for their specific store. So you can find a suitable affiliate tracking software, install, run and manage it all yourself. Or you can use outsource services(e.g. SEO services).
Performance based marketing involves giving a payment when the desired action is completed. Two of the most popular actions that top Online merchants pay for are Pay-Per-Sale and Pay-Per-Lead. A Pay-Per-Sale transaction is complete when the traffic makes a purchase. The merchant should decide how much commission gets payed to the affiliate in advance. A Pay-Per-Lead transaction is complete when the traffic completes an Online form with personal data like name, email etc. The merchant decides in advance how much they will pay for each lead.
In both cases, the traffic is tracked, and all sales and leads get automatically credited to the affiliates accounts.