Affiliate Marketing for Small Business Success

A lot of people have yet to learn what affiliate marketing is, let alone apply it to promoting their product or service on the internet. If you’re not quite sure what affiliate marketing is, a simple way to put it is:

A way for one website to make money online while promoting another. Website or blog owners get money for helping businesses by promoting the products or services they have to sell.

Basically, a person gets a commission when someone follows a link on their website, blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed…etc. However, that is just one way of many variations people can get paid. They may get compensated if someone signs up for the company’s newsletter or only if they make a purchase. Payments are usually based on a percentage, but fixed rates aren’t out of the question.

When you apply affiliate marketing techniques to your small business website design, and do so correctly, it can produce favorable results for your small business. In fact even when it’s done wrong, it does very little harm to your company.

How Do I Get Started?
You need to gather a collection of people who own websites, blogs or social media pages. You can get as professional as designing and ad that people can see on other websites to encourage them to click, or simply have a link ready to offer for status update feeds and external link pages for other websites. You pay your affiliate website based on a percentage or fixed rate agreed upon at the beginning of the marketing campaign. Look for websites in your community that aren’t direct competitors and ask if they’re interested. You can approach competition if they are located far away and their services or products can’t be obtained online. You should always be looking for affiliates who have something in common with what you have to sell. For instance, if you sell pet leashes, it would be best to try and set up an affiliate marketing program with companies that sell pet food, grooming services or sites where you purchase pet medicines. You want to approach affiliates who already have high traffic to their websites, as this will yield the best results.

As for how to negotiate the compensation for your affiliates, that’s up to you. Though pay per lead campaigns tend to give the affiliate money more often, it is the pay per sale program that offers them more money in general. Affiliate marketing is a strategy that you can easily design and apply to your small business website in a way that works for you. Don’t confuse affiliate marketing with link exchanging, though it’s similar, it’s not the same and does not work as well.

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