Affiliate programs - the real online business
Affiliate programs - what are they ?
I talked about 2 online income generating business models in my previous post Making money with Google Adsense program
One is the Google Adsense where you display ads from Google’s customers on your website and get a share of revenue when people click on them.
The second is also a revenue sharing concept. However this resembles a conventional business very closely. Only difference here is that you will not be responsible for deliveries. In the conventional business world, Affiliate business can also be called as ‘Partnership’ or ‘Franchising’ or ‘Agency’, etc.
In an affiliate business, you have to promote products of companies you are affiliated with. i.e, you will provide the leads to the companies. When there is a sale, commission will be paid to you.
The model here will mostly be pay per action, i.e, you will be paid a commission only when there is a sale. However, there are also some companies who operate on a pay per lead model. Here you get paid a token amount for leading customers to the companies’ website. If your leads go ahead and buy the products, you will get a commission.
Why affiliate marketing
Just look at the statistics and you will realise why affiliate business if the way forward for steady online income.
Though the statistics are primarily focussed on the UK market, it is not very different from the results in other parts of the world (especially Europe and the US markets). This information is sourced fromone of the affiliate networks’ website Affiliate Window.
“Online shopping has been predicted by to account for 40% of all UK retail sales by 2020. Currently households spend 10% (£980) of their annual shopping budget online typically on holidays, electronics, clothes and gifts items.
Affiliate marketing in the UK grew by an estimated 45% during 2007, taking the total value of online sales generated by this channel for that year to over £3 billion. With a conservative estimate of commissions and fees paid out to affiliate networks amounting to £186 million, an increase of 40% on 2006. This covers both the affiliate commission and network override.
The same report found that UK merchants involved in affiliate marketing drive 16% of their online sales via this channel and that 78% of them expected to be “more reliant” on affiliate marketing by 2009.
In light of these statistics and predictions it is clear that affiliate marketing should form part of an integrated and successful digital marketing strategy.”
I have been running a successful affiliate mobile phone business website with considerable success. I keep on improving on it from time to time.
The most important thing is to driverelevant traffic to your website containing your affiliate links. I will discuss how to drive relevant traffic to your website in another article. Once I finish with it, I will provide a link from here too, so that you save time searching for it.
End note: Affiliate programs are a very profitable online business option which you should seriously consider.
Written by Home Worker on April 13th, 2009 with
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