Internet Affiliate Marketing
In the early days of ecommerce, businesses set up your site, bought a domain name, placed banner ads and hoped for the best: press coverage, word of mouth, banner ad click-throughs and eventually a closed sale. Life got more complicated quickly as banner ads proliferated and people managed to ignore them with increasing skill. Internet marketers thus had to become more savvy, and the affiliate model was introduced. The model: get other sites to reference your site and increase traffic and sales with “a little help from your friends.” This concept of having others reference you (and sometimes setting up a joint-referencing model back at your partner) is the premise of affiliate marketing.
For prospective marketers considering entering this new space, this paper suggests how to create and maximize the affiliate experience. It will also highlight pros and cons of affiliate marketing and suggest situations where it may be best to avoid such a strategy altogether.
One of the best examples of affiliate marketing comes from retailer Amazon.com. Amazon has at least 30,000 affiliates and a 15% commission rate for sales of what they call “linked-to books.” Such a structure is not static, as Amazon now offers additional 5% commission on purchases made by shoppers brought to their site by an affiliate[1]. Such information indicates that even a media and ecommerce giant like Amazon has decided it pays to join forces with others and the benefits warrant paying others for the service!
In an article on affiliate marketing, web author Dr. Ralph Wilson suggested six considerations in setting up an affiliate program. His suggestions are:
Provide a regular accounting of sales.
Pay as often as ...
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...and ad revenues—think of pointclick.com and others). This affiliate marketing paper has covered a “submodel” – one that fits inside proposition two and proposition three. For readers interested in seeing how much more savvy the field has become, go to the following locations: www.netcentives.com, and www.mypoints.com. Both sites advertise and promote a customer-loyalty, revenue-generating ecommerce solution that reads like an affiliate program on steroids. I suggest delving into both of these sites if readers are interested in seeing the latest tactics for marketing in the business to business and in the business to consumer market.
[1] Wilson, Ralph, “How To Retain Your Affiliates,” Web Commerce Today, Issue 10, May 1998.
[2] Wilson, Ralph, Dr., “The Waning and Waxing of Affiliate Marketing Programs,” Web Commerce Today, July 15, 1999.
[3] Ibid.
The growth of online business has grown enormously over the years. Cliptomania is a family operated and owned small e-business that primarily sells clip on earrings (Brown, DeHayes, Hoffer, Martin, & Perkins, 2012, p. 308). Cliptomania early developments were very modest, and as such the company experienced copious strategic dilemmas. An initial strategic dilemma that the company encountered when establishing and building their new e-business undertaking was to create a website for the business operations and essentially to have it fully operable. The owners, Jim and Candy elected to hire a vendor to host the website and additionally utilize the IT systems resources of the vendor to sustain their business. At the very beginning they exploited the offerings of the Yahoo Store. However, continuing down this avenue of using the services of the Yahoo Store inevitably became too costly. By using the services and business offerings of a vendor made it convenient and effortless for Jim and Candy to start their e-business store. Unfortunately the couple did not have much in the way of professional help, and so they had to create and put together the website by themselves. Additionally they also had to deal with establishing their online credibility as many customers preferred to call in their orders just to talk with a real person before being comfortable enough to place their orders via the webpage.
Pelton, L. E., Strutton, D. & Lumpkin, J. R. 2002, Marketing channels: a relationship management approach. McGraw-Hill Irwin: Boston, p. 387.
The key elements of an affiliate expansion plan will be 1) establishing a methodology to identify attractive countries in which to operate; 2) developing and implementing practical individual and corporate fundraising strategies; and 3) creating strategies to engage governments. The plan will also take into consideration the cost and benefits of implementing suggested approaches.
In two distinct e-commerce business types, Business-to-business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C), there are many differences in the way they operate. Specifically in marketing, differences include how the marketing is driven and the values of the strategies, the size of the target market and length of the sales cycle, and even the buying patterns of the target consumers. Each of these differences will be better defined and explained in the following paragraphs.
The ultimate goal of B2C marketing is to convert shoppers into buyers as aggressively and consistently as possible. B2C companies employ more merchandising activities like coupons, displays, store fronts (both real and Internet) and offers to entice the target market to buy. B2C marketing campaigns are concerned with the transaction, are shorter in duration and need to capture the customer’s interest immediately. These campaigns often offer special deals, discounts, or vouchers that can be used both online and in the store. For example, the goal of an email campaign for a B2C company is to get consumers to buy the product immediately. The email will take the consumer to a landing page on the web site that is designed to sell the product and make purchasing very easy by integrating the shopping cart and checkout page into the flow of the transaction. Any more than a couple of clicks and the customer is likely to abandon the shopping cart.
Wong, T. (2009). Exploratory data analysis of Amazon.com book reviews [PDF document]. (Thesis submitted in the fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of honors in statistics). Retrieved from http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/Research/Ugrad/Timothy.Thesis.pd
Schultz, D.E., et al., 1994. The new marketing paradigm: integrated marketing communications. NTC Business Books, pp. 105-156.
...tising revenue model in which the company will provide a forum for advertisements and receives fees from the companies that advertise for them.
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about ways web hosting businesses can increase their sales output by combining coupon marketing with affiliate marketing. Most web hosting companies follow the standard procedure: they send their coupon offers to the affiliate partners, who then promote these discounts via their newsletters or blogs. These vouchers generally reduce the price of the service by 20 to 50 percent, and the affiliate partners grab their share of the revenue. Now, one reader asked me an interesting question: if acquiring new customers is the whole purpose of coupon marketing, how do web hosting companies identify them?
Contrasted with conventional publicizing and web promoting, including keyword purchases and show advertisements, ereferrals are probably going to be viewed as more tenable by customers who get them (Ahrens, R. Coyle, & Strahilevitz, 2013). The behavior of refer something in India and Indonesia have a little bit different for each country, for example like in India, the concern is in online shopping, matrimonial, tour and travel, and job referral or affiliate programs. For the other terms like games, finance they are not dominated for this kind of program (Gourabmalla, 2014). On the other side, Indonesia dominated the behavior of sharing referral programs on online shopping, digital platforms, fashion, travel, books, course and custom (40 AFFILIATE PROGRAM INDONESIA GRATIS DAN TERPERCAYA, 2015).
Amazon.com creates value for its customers by offering customers broad array of products to select from through their website and ensuring timely delivery of products to exhibit high level of commitment towards their business and customers
After my days of selling postage meters were long over, and I was in my senior year of college, I decided to start my own company. I wrote two books on college admission and college life and marketed them through the internet. After three month of diligent work, I sold over 500 books and expanded the company to five employees. Since selling only two books was proving so successful, I decided to branch out and try my hands at an affiliate driven superstore. I partnered with web sites like Amazon.com and Reel.com and became officially licensed to sell their merchandise. My time and effort resulted in many visitors to my on-line superstore, but sales were few and far between. The business needed a change of direction.
Bookstores, such as Eslite, began to gain profits after years of establishment and it made a profit in affiliate products. Thus, my aim is to develop a dynamic space for both education and entertainment for the niches market, transforming the bookstore, a space merely for buying books, to a socialized and interactive space full of cultural derivatives and creative
Business models have been defined and categorized in many different ways, though all four websites examined have components of advertising, merchant, and manufacturing models. The web advertising model is an extension of the traditional media broadcast model, yet in this case the web site provides content mixed with advertising messages in the form of banner ads (Berger & Nasr, 1998). On the other hand, the merchant model involves wholesale of goods, while the manufacturer model is said to be based on efficiency, improved customer service, and a better understanding of customer preference (Berger & Nasr, 1998).
Technological advances and the expansion on online direct marketing are impacting the nature and design of marketing channels. With disintermediation, layers of intermediaries are eliminated from a marketing channel or new types of intermediaries displace traditional resellers. A new trend witnesses product and services producers bypassing intermediaries and going directly to final buyers.