Marketing Strategy

Affiliate Marketing Programs

Written by Chukwuma Asala for Gaebler Ventures

Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest yet more effective ways to increase a company's exposure, especially via the internet. How does it work exactly and what makes it so effective?

What makes Affiliate Marketing such an effective strategy for increasing your company's exposure on the internet?

Affiliate Marketing Programs

Helps leverage resources

The most appealing aspect of affiliate marketing to most companies is that you get to leverage the strengths of all the companies that are a part of the affiliate program. The internet powerhouse Amazon has been doing this since the turn of this century and has seen great results by giving companies access to their website as a central hub.

Most consumers till this day still do not realize that Amazon does not sell everything that it has on its website. It simply partners with a multitude of companies that have a variety of niches in the market and keep them under its own umbrella. This gives the impression that Amazon sells almost every product under the sun, and it does, but it does indirectly. The bigger the Affiliate Program the more companies here about and want to participate, the more products that are available, etc.

Uses incremental compensation as incentive

Companies today will pay you for the community you have, which is the case for e-tailers like Amazon and Amway Global. So if you wanted to get customers to come to your company's website, you could find a company that had an affiliate program and set up a contract to establish yourself as one of the sellers on their website. Most of these companies will charge you a certain amount of profit for every item they help you to sell off of their website but it usually is a bargain and nothing that you cannot afford.

It might be 20% of the profit you would generate from the sale or it might even be as low as 10% or as high as 30%. This is a very effective way to increase exposure, because if you think about it a lot of that money you are giving up you would have used for advertising anyway. Think of it as a trade-off.

Eliminates hard costs

One of the biggest things the internet has done is it has made doing business a much more global enterprise. The worldwide web literally implies just that: worldwide. So commerce on the internet would now be possible to the entrepreneurs who could harness some of the latest trends. Affiliate marketing is so appealing because it is directly linked to this concept of eliminating the costs that most traditional businesses have.

Take a well-known store like Barnes and Noble. The second e-commerce launched Barnes and Noble immediately picked up its own domain name so it too could also access the limitless opportunity the internet presented. The internet eliminates the need for Barnes and Noble to set up more physical stores anywhere else in the country. If Barnes and Noble can sell books over affiliate marketing portals like Amazon, Amway Global, or other powerhouses in online retail, they successfully eliminate the costs of advertising, employees to staff their stores, overhead for maintaining and renting the property for the stores, etc.

Chukwuma Asala is an international student from Nigeria who is studying to earn an MBA from the State University of New York in Albany. He has analyzed more than 20 industry case studies throughout his education thus far, and hopes to bring some of his business knowledge to Gaebler.com.

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