Introduction - if you are not sure what a web site's affiliate
marketing program actually entails, we has put together a generic overview of
'what is an affiliate program' below, and how this business
model fits into the wider context of disciplines of 'affiliate marketing'.
We hope this will help you understand the principles, processes and
opportunity that awaits you with Assetsure.com. Whether you are an
experienced webmaster or just starting with your own new web site, our affiliate
program provides a simple and effective way to generate a serious
residual income stream for you and your business. If you own or manage a
website that has 'related' offerings to Assetsure.com, you have a practical
and proven opportunity to cross sell our products and make money... Do you
think your website visitors have a need to purchase any of the following insurances
listed below?... if so you could be making a commission in minutes - by simply joining our program and directing them from
your website to ours.... The insurances include holiday home
insurance, blocks of flats insurance, listed building insurance, property
insurance for home owners, empty property insurance, underpinned insurance,
commercial property insurance, thatched roof insurance and many more niche,
'difficult to get' building related insurances.
What is a Affiliate Program? - if you are new the web site marketing and
keen to explore a referral method to make money, there are thousands of
affiliate programs to choose from. An affiliate program is a commercial
arrangement whereby a product or service provider agrees to pay a commission to
an approved affiliate for referring prospects to their website. The
Affiliate can choose to either paste in a combination of links, banners, forms,
and other sales and marketing material on their website to persuade their
website visitors to visit the Merchant website and hopefully buy something.
The Merchant usually deals with the customer, sells their product and service
and processes the transaction (if credit cards are involved in an ecommerce
situation), leaving the Affiliate to only worry about sending as many qualified
visitors from their website to the Merchant website.
How Does an Affiliate Get Paid? - there are three different methods of
commission the Merchant may typically offer; Firstly, the the affiliate is
paid on a pay per sale basis where the every time an affiliate send a
prospect to the Merchant's website and that prospect buys something. the
affiliate gets paid a pre-agreed commission. If the prospect decides to
not spend any money, the affiliate gets nothing. The method is profitable
for the affiliate where the Affiliate visitors have a direct buying motivation
in the Merchants products and Services; the higher the conversion rate, the
higher the commission. This could be a % of the sale value or a fixed sum
of money. For these reasons, the pay per sale method is usually a lot higher
than the second method... Secondly, the pay per click affiliate
commission model relies on a prospect visiting the Affiliate's website and
'clicking' on the Merchant's advert to take them to the Merchant site.
Every click is rewarded but at much lower rates than pay per sale and a high
proportion do not end up buying anything. The conversion rates for
products varies but an average 1-3% conversion rate form prospect to customer is
not out of the ordinary. If there is a high degree of website content
synergy between Affiliate and Merchant, the conversion rate would typically be
higher. With a pay per click model the only thing that matters to the
affiliate is trying to visually compel the prospect to click on the paid advert
of the Merchant. Lastly, a pay per lead commission could be
agreed whereby the Merchant agrees to pay the affiliate a fixed sum every time a
prospect completes a question form such as a 'request for quote' form.
Usually certain qualifying criteria is included in this method such a minimum
potential order value for a mortgage, or a checkable postcode and phone number
to ensure authenticity. Historically, banner adverts were first
used by Merchants to allow Affiliates to help promote their products or
services, paid on a pay per impression basis - these have largely proved
ineffective and not a good return on investment, subject to non human (searchbot
and spider) accidental manipulation and outright click fraud. People also
began to get annoyed with flashing in your adverts. The normal
practice for practically paying affiliates the commission they are owed is
'monthly in areas', physically undertaken by the Merchant using via a secure
electronic transfer or by cheque in the post.
Types of Affiliate Program - merchants typically can set up a one level
or two tier affiliate structure. In a two tier affiliate scheme,
affiliates are recruited and specifically encouraged to go and recruit more
affiliates. This has been extremely effective in areas such as network
marketing or in viral or vertical sectors where webmasters are experienced in
communicating and contacting other webmasters. In a one tier model a
residual income stream is sometimes offered by the Merchant to encourage the
Affiliate to keep on consistently promoting the Merchant's product and services
and not leave for a competitor. This income stream can provide invaluable,
especially where the end user product is based on renewals i.e. annual renewals
of insurance policies or to an annual membership to a club.
What is an Affiliate Network? - an online affiliate network is a
collection of Merchants who agree to publicise their affiliate program in a
single affiliate directory. The affiliate directory usually provides all
the affiliate tracking code and sign up code for prospective affiliates.
In addition, the network attracts hundreds of Affiliates, leaving the Merchant
to get on with his business. Some affiliate networks charge up to 40% of
the sale value for this service so they can become expensive.
How Does an Affiliate Program Form Part of an Overall Internet Marketing
Strategy? - whether a website is run by a few individuals or major business
interests, the use of an affiliate program is broadly similar in principle.
However in practice, smaller websites in particular have to divide their
valuable marketing resource time, to maximise the potential number of prospect
site visitors. Other internet marketing techniques are available to a
Merchant but all take time to implement... such as search
engine optimisation whereby the website structure and content (words and
sentences) are deliberately organised in a way by the webmaster, to make them
search engine friendly and hopefully ensure a high ranking for specific search
engine key phrases. An entire industry of online 'expert' consultants have
sprung up to assist the naive or optimistic small business owner, that typically
has no clue about how search engines work or doesn't want to know anyway.
However, the optimisation black art is becoming more of a formal marketing
discipline these days with Global conferences being held reporting on good
practices using practical case studies. In addition, search engines like
Google, Yahoo and MSN improve the quality of their mathematical algorithms to
deliver ever increasingly relevant search results for their users.
Merchants must constantly invest time in the changing nature of optimised search
to ensure their rankings do not suffer... recent changes include local
search targeting which used the zip/ postcode, IP address and 'history' to
target the users query. In addition, the use of 'universal search' where
not just textual information but also relevant multimedia information is
embedded in the pages of search results, to help users find exactly what they
want as quickly as possible.
The fast moving discipline of optimisation critically includes reciprocal
linking processes in order to increase potential website visitor numbers.
Reciprocal linking is where website owners send and receive their respective
site visitors each other. It is a mutually beneficially agreement between
webmasters to add a link between each other to help their website's rankings and
hopefully sell more widgets as visitors move between related websites.
The number of inbound links into a website is a crude measure of its
link popularity (which in turn boost search engine rankings). In
addition, the relevancy of those links i.e. a link from a table website
to a website selling chairs is deemed highly relevant by the search engine
algorithms, because the semantic keywords and phrases or likely to be very
similar in meaning and topic. There is a lot to learn and it is a
full time career... however, with an effective
affiliate program search engines become less relevant if hundreds of other
websites are creating the demand for you.
