Inbound Marketing: 11 Types of Affiliate Marketing Explained
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is basically a relationship between the advertiser, the publisher, and the consumer.
The advertiser is anyone who has a business and is willing to pay someone else to help him/her to promote or sell his/her business.
The publisher, on the other hand, is that company or individual who promotes a product or service from an advertiser in exchange for a commission.
The advertiser will work with the publisher on contract and will provide the publisher with creative data that they can incorporate into their website for purposes of promoting the product or service.
The consumer is the one who takes an action after seeing the advertisement. The action the consumer takes will transfer him/her from the publisher’s website to that of the advertiser so as to complete the action they had decided to take which is known as a conversion.
Well, to reap the best results it is better to have a website, however, there’s definitely nothing to worry if you do not have one immediately or cannot afford one at the moment. Learn in this article how to go about in the event that you don’t have a website.
What are the different types of affiliate marketers?
There are a number of affiliate marketers in the market currently. Here are some types of these affiliates that you can decide to work with.
1. Webmasters
These are people who own their own sites and those who are also building websites. The number of webmasters available is mind-blowing and they all have different levels of expertise.
Most of these webmasters are already signed into shareasale or CJ where you can easily contact them for a partnership or you can decide to directly contact them on their website and give them a proposal.
2. Search Affiliates
These are people who actually spend their own money to try and leverage the search engines, facebook advertising and many other paid advertising models so as to generate an RIO for affiliate offers as well as themselves.
These types of affiliates are very entrepreneurial and business minded and test very many different things. They are the best to work with as long as they are following the rules and use the recommended procedures as they can generate a lot of traffic for you as well as revenue.
3. Bloggers
These types of affiliates are great when it comes to posting information about company and reviews about your new products.
All you will need to do is send them samples of the products and ask them to do a review which will help to spread the word about the products.
All the things that bloggers write about tend to organically rank in the search engine. It’s quite important to look for a blogger who is willing to promote your products or your company and its services as this will help to increase your traffic and ultimately the number of conversions you get.
A really good pool to get bloggers from is the mummy blogger pool as they are many and essentially have the time to blog about you.
4. Coupon Sites
Due to the resent recessions, most people are on the search for coupons from various merchants. This makes coupon sites a really important affiliate for your business.
These sites can sort of behave like a double edged sword as it has equal parts advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that you will get increased traffic to our website and thus increase your revenue.
The disadvantage of working with coupon sites is that these sites will capitalize on the organic rankings that are associated to your company’s name and the word coupon code.
These sites usually have an established member base that can be quite beneficial to you as a business looking to improve its conversion rate and revenue thus making it a bit important to overlook the negative of working with coupon sites.
5. Review Sites
These type of affiliates will build a website that will review up to six different advertises in a particular niche. These review sites are quite popular with affiliate marketers.
This type of hosting is mostly used by hosts dealing with dating companies, flower companies, phone companies and all others that require taking about 5 different advertisers, putting them in one site and running an organic search or a paid search through all those pages that feature different reviews.
The affiliate will only earn a commission when he/she refers some business to any of those advertisers thus making review sites a very large and well converting demography of marketing affiliates.
6. Loyalty Portals
Loyalty portals are basically companies which have a very large membership base and are able to expose your offer as an advertiser to its members and sometimes may even contain a cash back policy.
There are very many loyalty portals in the market right now that work on a performance basis that you can choose from to improve your business.
7. Incentive Programs
These programs have both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that you will get increased traffic of prospects while the disadvantage will be that the people taking action on your advertisement because they are being given points tend to skew down the quality of the leads and sales while increasing the return rates.
There is also the problem of virtual currency which is still a new development in the business industry.
Users will earn virtual currency through their social networking and then you get some companies leveraging their affiliate advertisers to allow these users to redeem their virtual cash to make their purchases and thus making a saving. This is both good and bad as you may get very few sales while your volume increases.
8. Email Marketing
This type of marketing has been around for many years now and has gone through a couple of changes.
Ensure that if you choose to use email marketing, you choose maximum five email vendors to work with on a performance basis.
Ensure that everything they do is CAN-SPAM compliant and you won’t experience any issues. This should actually be an additional source of income for you.
9. Partnership and Business Development
This method of affiliate marketing will require you to reach out to as many affiliates as possible so you can get just a handful of reliable business partners.
When you get that perfect partnership the benefits tend to be good and the partnership also lasts for a long time.
10. Traditional Media
These include TV, radio and print media which can be contracted on a CPA basis on a rev share. All you have to do is make a proposal to each of these media outlets and individual stations.
This form of affiliate market is quite effective and has been used for a long time and will be used for a longer period still.
11. Big web Properties
These are websites that get quite a huge traffic in any given period of time. You can choose to have your banner displayed on these websites which can lead to increased traffic for you.
The big web properties are more receptive to rev share deals and CPA deals as they will go for anything that will convert and make them money.
These points are enough insights into what affiliate marketing is and how it is carried out, and the different types of affiliate marketing available to anyone who wants to take a dip into the world of affiliates.
Ensure that you evaluate all your goals and needs before picking the type of affiliate marketer you want to use.
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