Affiliate Marketing
What is affiliate marketing?
The most common example of affiliate marketing is reciprocal links. In essence this is to find another company/organisation who you can partner with and either share advertising costs by working together or by trading links.
More complex versions if this is to promote your affiliate’s business or service as part of a package – for example, buy our high energy drink and get a month’s free membership to Jim’s Gym. In return Jim’s Gym would sell your drinks as their preferred beverage – possibly at discounted rates. This affiliation is often referred to as affinity marketing.
Essentially it is finding a complimentary partner/s and entering into a joint venture to increase awareness of both parties. As mentioned above the most common of these is reciprocal linking – “I’ll link to you if you link to me”. The more of these links you can build up the better but the key is to make sure your affiliate has a good page rank in the search engines and is seen as a trusted source – otherwise your affiliation may bring your rankings down!
How does affiliate marketing work?
There are various methods of tracking and paying for affiliate schemes. The predominant method, currently accounting for approximately 80% of existing affiliate schemes, is the Cost per Sale (CPS) compensation method. This method works on a predefined percentage of any sales resulting from the affiliate recommendation being paid to the affiliate. This method makes affiliate marketing much more affordable as costs are only incurred once an actual sale is made.
As well as the preferred Cost per Sale method, 19% of affiliate marketing programmes use the Cost per Action (CPA) method and the remaining 1% use Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per Mille (CPM). The Cost per Action (CPA) method works on payment for a predefined action – this could be the user filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter or referring a friend. The action for the CPA method does not usually include pay per click – as this would then constitute the Cost per Click (CPC) method.
The difference between Cost per Click and Cost per Mille is basically paying for individual click throughs versus paying per 1000 impressions. An impression is basically a single showing of the advert – this could be a page visit where a banner advert is displayed, a television advert showing or even a single advert play on radio. Cost per Mille is often referred to as Cost Per Thousand (CPT).
Serious Affiliate Marketing Schemes
As well as the standard online affiliate schemes, Serious Ideas take Affiliate Marketing to a whole new level with the introduction of our Brand Matching affinity marketing programmes. More on our revolutionary Brand Matching schemes can be seen here. Other affiliate marketing services offered are:
- Brand matching research
- Affiliate scheme strategies
- Referral scheme strategies and delivery
- etc
Let us help you find Seriously good partnerships
Top tip
Every company already has a collection of affiliates without having to look for them – these can be suppliers, clients, Chambers of Commerce, accrediting bodies etc Make life easier by finding the ones that already exist first.
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