Affiliate Marketing Overview

Using an Affiliate Marketing Network allows other website owners to promote your product on their website in return for a fixed fee or percentage of sale.

Use an affiliate marketing campaign to have your banners or text ads displayed on other websites and:

• Pay a fixed fee when you get a Sales Inquiry (a prospect fills out your Sales Inquiry form on your website)
• Pay a fixed fee when you get an Email Lead (somebody uses your website to subscribe to your Email list)
• Pay a fixed fee or % commission when you get a Sale (somebody uses your website to purchase your product or service)

You set the amount of the fee or commission you want to offer your affiliates. You don’t pay them until you get a result. And you control which websites get to display your ads.

You use an Affiliate Network to get your product promoted through third party websites. Examples of affiliate networks include ClixGalore and Commission Monster.

Investing in establishing your own Affiliate Network might give you an effective marketing asset that will work for you for years to come and get your offer out to a very wide audience.

Note: You can promote other products on your website with specific affiliate programs such as Amazon Associates. The difference is you sell their product on your website – using an affiliate network means other people sell your product for you on their website.

Affiliate network campaigns can take some skill to set up, so be prepared to do the work to get your product out to market.

Here is how you can work with an Affiliate Network:

• You use an Affiliate Network to publish your affiliate program. Affiliates ask to join and you approve them.
• Affiliates place your banners or text links on their website and send visitors to your website.
• You pay affiliates a fee or commission for leads or sales from visitors they send to your website.

The following diagram shows how affiliate marketing works in more detail (click the image to see a larger version)

Affiliate marketing means:

• You don’t pay your affiliates to market for you. You pay only when you receive leads or sales.
• Your brand is promoted on other websites, giving you increased brand exposure.
• Affiliate websites may already have built trust with their audience. Your product is presented to them from a trusted source.
• Using a third party affiliate manager reduces administration and risk for merchants and affiliates.
• Paying for performance rather than marketing effort allows you to link marketing costs to results.
• You get access to an established base of affiliate websites to market your business.
• You have full control over which affiliate websites display your banners.

Getting a Campaign Started

Once you understand how affiliate marketing works, there are a number of things you need to do to get going.

You can choose to do this yourself, or you can ask Cybosys for help.

The steps that need to be considered are:

• Campaign Plan. Prepare a Campaign Plan that writes down the objectives of the campaign, the products/services that will be included and the initial affiliate offer to be made (fee for lead, fee/commission for sale).
• Choose an Affiliate Network. There are different affiliate networks to consider, each with different costs and benefits.
• Affiliate Banners. Prepare text links and affiliate banners.
• Set Up Affiliate Account. Get your affiliate account established, setup your affiliate banners and test.
• Setting up Conversion Tracking. Install the conversion tracking code from your affiliate account into your Cybosys website.
• Affiliate Recruitment. Recruit initial affiliates to review your affiliate offer.

Affiliate Network Fees

In setting up your Affiliate Network account, you may be required to pay an annual promotional fee to the network. In addition, you may also need to set up a pre-paid balance for affiliate payments. The amount of these fees varies according to the affiliate network

Reporting

Once your affiliate marketing campaign is started, you should consider how you will monitor and optimize the campaign to improve it:

• review the progress of the campaign
• identify optimizations (for example, to improve conversion)
• analyze metrics for affiliates, clicks, leads and costs