Affiliate Marketing 2020: How Affiliate Program Works
How many times have you heard of affiliate marketing? Many people have heard of this and yet they don’t know what it means. According to Big Commerce, affiliate marketing is a popular tactic to drive sales and generate significant online revenue, while affiliate program as per Practicale Commerce, is a relationship in which a merchant pays you (the “affiliate”) for links from your site to his site. To cut it short, an affiliate program is a type of advertising that mostly makes profit by advertising and promoting a product or service.
Affiliate marketing works with three people involved: the seller, the affiliate and the consumer. What happens if these three are already working together? What are different types of affiliate marketing program and how does it work?
- Pay per sale
A remunerative method in advertising is called pay per sale. This profitable method of advertising uses promotion and marketing of products and services to earn commission from the sales of the company extracted from the hard work of the affiliate and third party promoters. This type of marketing is popular with affiliates though it is a lot more challenging than other types of affiliate marketing because before actually earning your commission, your prospect should actually be a sale instead of only being interested with the product or service.
- Pay per lead
This affiliate program is a scheme where the affiliate is paid depending on the quality of the lead they generated. It may look easy but the lead generated must be qualified and must meet a criteria agreed by both the agent and the company; usually involving a required action such as signing up for an account, filling out a contact form, answering a short survey, online form submission, subscribe to a newsletter, download any files or software and etc. The agent must persuade the client to do the required action and criteria in order to gain profit because the company pays a fixed commission for every lead generated that has qualified for the criteria agreed by both the merchant and affiliate.
- Pay per click
The pay per click program is like buying visits for your site rather than earning them organically, thus lets the merchant pay the affiliate for every valid action done on their website. The program focuses on redirecting the lead onto the site because the more traffic the website gains, the more sales percentage the affiliate would earn.
Basically, affiliate marketing is all about strategic growth and an ideal job for people who have exceptional marketing skills. There are things you should consider for a successful affiliate marketing such as building trust and having a brand. You should also know your partners to fully have an understanding on how you will be paid for your work and know the legal requirements. Always have a track on the traffic and lead you generated so you’ll know how much you will earn by the end of your work. Success depends on your hard work and perseverance and the time and effort you invest on your work.