Gear Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy To Exploit Other Sites' Traffic

Affiliate marketing is a branch of online marketing that uses one website to drive traffic to another. Considered a valuable method of website promotion, affiliate marketing works when site A (affiliate) agrees to feature banner ads from site B. When a visitor clicks site B's banner, goes to their site, and takes meaningful action (a purchase, subscription, membership, etc) the affiliate site is rewarded with a commission or fee.

For those looking to increase their website traffic and awareness, affiliate marketing is a great way to tap into the large visitor numbers of popular sites in your market or demographic. But as with any sound marketing initiative, promoting your site by way of affiliates must be done under the purview of a detailed affiliate marketing strategy.

Developing An Affiliate Marketing Strategy

By generating a large amount of traffic, a web site owner can attract revenue from other businesses (like you) wanting access that traffic. But how do you know who to partner with?

The key to a prudent and precise affiliate marketing strategy is to identify online partner sites that compliment but don't compete with your business. You can achieve great results at little cost by focusing your affiliate marketing strategy on sites where your customers are likely to be. And as with many online marketing techniques, affiliate marketing allows you to test certain sites and ads to see which are working most effectively.

But while chopping and changing partners and ad messages can be a great way to find what works, it can also be counter-productive. The wiser way to go is to have your affiliate marketing strategy, replete with a host of contingencies, prepared before rolling your campaign out.

In establishing an affiliate marketing strategy you'll consider things like whether it's best for your business to target very narrow niche sites or to go wide on popular branded sites, for instance.

Let Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy Determine How You Pay

Affiliates have several ways of charging you. Which method you choose should be determined by the approach you mapped-out in your affiliate marketing strategy.

An affiliate may use a Pay Per Click (PPC) method whereby you pay every time a visitor (potential customer) clicks on your ad. It's irrelevant (in terms of compensation) how often your ad is displayed. Commission is due only when the ad is clicked.

Alternatively, your affiliate marketing strategy may require a Cost Per Mil (CPM) method of compensation. In this case you pay the affiliate for every 1000 impressions. Note that an "impression" is NOT a click; it's a page view or display of your ad.

The original but rarer method is Cost Per Sale (CPS). As an example, say you have an ebook for sale. If a visitor comes to your site via your affiliate and buys your ebook, then you'll pay a percentage of the sale to your affiliate.

While CPS is still possible, you need to have a red hot product to get the affiliate interested. Otherwise they prefer to guaranteed revenue that PPC or CPM models offer.