Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the fastest growing segment of the online ad industry, comprising over 55% of total online ad spending. Affiliate marketing uses links that look similar to ordinary pay-for-click advertisements (see examples below). These links consists of code that you copy from an affiliate site and paste in into your website just like you do with ordinary ads. But the difference lies in the back-end processing. With affiliate links, payment comes not from simple clicks to the advertiser's site, but instead comes in the form of commissions when click-through vistors buy products or services from the advertiser. This formula makes it possible for smaller sites to earn higher revenue than they would from pay-for-click provided they know how to find the right advertisers, create affective links, and create the right content in which to place the ads.

For the small business, the main attraction of affiliate marketing is that success favors quality rather than quantity of traffic. In other words, fifty clicks by motivated buyers from a small specialty site can be worth more in sales to an advertiser than 5,000 clicks of the mildly curious from a mass media site. Thus the affiliate model helps place small sites on equal footing with larger ones because it takes the emphasis off of unique visitor and page view statistics - advertisers don't need that information when they are only paying for completed sales. So thanks to affiliate marketing, smaller content publishers with great content can generate significant revenue and get major companies such as Ebay, Amazon, and Apple to advertise on their websites.

But success with affilate marketing is far from automatic. It takes significant work and experience to create a successful affiliate revenue stream. We have found that the most successful affiliate campaigns are ones where the website provides expert information and recommends targeted products for its audience. This could be a teacher recommending certain books, a therapist recommending a particular therapeutic device, or a consultant recommending related services. For example, an eye doctor can recommend a specialized light for low vision patients and use an affiliate link on her website to specify the exact product a patient should buy. These types of links can create excellent word-of-mouth repeat sales as others go to your site to buy the exact products you recommended to their friends.