Affiliate Marketing for the mere mortals

Viral marketing is about marketing techniques that are meant to increase brand awareness, on the basis of preexisting social networks. It works by means of self-replicating viral processes, which might prove (in a more metaphorical way) similar to the spread of pathological viruses.

Viral marketing is usually delivered through word-of-mouth or even enhanced by the network effects of the Internet and it is seen as a marketing "strategy", encouraging people to pass along a marketing passage voluntarily.

This strategy starts from the premises that a satisfied customer always tells other people about a certain product/service he was satisfied with. I recently read an article about what viral marketing is not  , which I found quite useful, underlining the skills necessary for a viral marketing campaign.

Google AdWords... most companies had to deal with in order to increase sales irrespective of the field of activity. Pay per Click campaigns can be a headache or even costly and without results if done incorrectly.

As you already know, Google AdWords is Google's advertising platform offering both cost per click, cost per impression and cost per conversion pricing for advertisements served on Google.com and partner sites.

Only the people who have invested money or managed AdWords with results are aware of the exact effort that is behind the AdWords campaign: making up full lists of keywords, testing, bidding, etc. Therefore, we propose through this article to present 10 such tools to aid you in the AdWords campaign and to reduce some of the time spent on research. Also, what is worth mentioning is that most of them are free of charge.

The affiliate marketing programs are widely viewed as a profitable, win-win situation for both parties involved in this process. Affiliation is becoming an increasingly powerful online marketing tool, as more and more worldwide merchants are establishing affiliate programs.

Studies show that nearly half of these networks count several thousands affiliates each. Even if the amount of sales is rather far from equal to those made by means of sponsored links or e-mailing, affiliate marketing allows merchants to extend the presence of their brands on the Web, targeting especially those sites that are in direct relationship with their target. This is actually a very efficient strategy to attract prospective customers to their Web sites.

I bet that if you aren't yet into selling your products through Affiliates it's because you didn't look for the benefits. And I can also bet that when you are thinking about doing more sales, you are thinking about hiring a new Sales Manager or paying for some advertisements.

No secret that the newly hired Sales will spend about 6 months trying to understand your products and the market (but, well, he gets paid even if he makes no sales in the learning time) and even when he starts selling it will still take 6 months to get him up to speed. About the advertisements, they are a sure cost and a not so sure result.

If you have been there and have done that (or just thinking on doing it) what about hiring not one but 1000 sales people (and promote your products widely) only paying a commission from sales made? If that sounds good, then you are already thinking to sell your products through affiliates - the pay per performance model.

Pioneered by Amazon, affiliate marketing is one of the most common, most effective and most powerful methods of earning income from online sales. It is a partnership between a merchant and an affiliate, which, if managed correctly, can bring significant benefits for both parties involved.

The principle on which affiliate programs work is simple: the merchant decides to promote certain products or services(according to its profile) online, and it creates affiliation programs for them, including detailed payment methods.

The merchant contacts webmasters with the proposition to promote those products/services on their Web sites, against a commission. A webmaster who subscribes to such an affiliate program becomes thus an affiliate. The affiliates will promote the products/services of the merchant by means of text links, search boxes, banner links, product links, etc.

Most of the times I have to answer merchant questions such as "How many sales are done through Affiliates?" or "How many active affiliates do you have?". These are true and valid questions, but in essence they come from the other side of the business: the affiliate marketer's ability to chose, promote and sell products.

Affiliate Marketing is really a 90/10 business - only 10% of the affiliates do actually sell something. The reasons behind are very complex and too difficult to discuss here, but the most common reason is because affiliates sign-up for "getting rich" programs, or (and this is the better alternative) for generic and non-targeted products.

There are so many ways to fail in affiliate marketing that it becomes so difficult to establish trust in the programs and methods that work. That's also why affiliates need to read about other affiliates who made it big, or at least read about what works and what doesn't.

Let's talk a little about a special breed of affiliate marketers, the ones that sell software (most likely download portals). They all look the same, sell the same products, have the same targeted buyer and you can't really make a difference - it's all about downloading a trial, testing the product and eventually buying it. And somehow, some download portals sell very well (how do they do it), while other are junk sites (what's wrong with them?).

However, the winning download portals are the ones that:

Affiliate performance metrics are probably the single most important tool that is ignored by both (un-successful) affiliates and merchants. If you go to any affiliate forums you'll see that the most desperate help calls are about getting more leads on one hand, and getting them to convert on the other.

If you (affiliate or merchant) are looking for ways to improve your site (or marketing efforts) to have more visitors with better conversion rates, you should start by looking at your metrics.

Every once in a while I get a vendor asking: "What's the difference between affiliates and resellers"? I couldn't find a reliable internet resource to support my usual answer about it, so I thought why not make an article of my own and see how well it goes in Google. So here we are.

Actually the biggest issue doesn't come from choosing between resellers and affiliates, but mostly from vendors that are questioning the channel conflict that might happen between their resellers/distributors and the affiliates.

The questions are especially important in the software industry where some of the sales techniques are shared by both resellers and affiliates.

The fact is that we don't actually have a conflict because there are some fundamental differences between them.

It is common knowledge that affiliate marketing can be a great money-making way for an Internet marketing business. However, most affiliate marketers today are facing the problem of not knowing which particular affiliate products to promote due to the fact that there are lots of niche affiliate programs to choose from. Fortunately, there are many ways of discovering and choosing the right niche affiliate marketing products to sell online. Here are some of the most frequent mistakes affiliate marketers tend to make.