What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Can It Help Me Achieve More Sales For My Website?

No doubt you have been searching for something on the internet and your first port of call is a search engine, for instance Google, Yahoo, MSN and the like. You type in a couple of words to search and on the first page of your search you click on the first link and are taken to a website. The website displays an advertising banner on the right of the screen, you click on the banner and are taken to another website. On this second website you then make a purchase for an item you have initially been searching for.

Congratulations, you just made that first and second website some money through affiliate marketing. Confused? So was I.

First let's discuss the general two options of affiliate marketing and show the benefits of both.

First option – The Affiliate.


To become an affiliate you need a couple of things. Usually this will be a website you own. Let's say you promote an information site about Extreme Sports and has a few hundred visitors a month. Your site covers aspects of the different sports and contains a couple of articles people can read that you constantly update with new info and another page with some links to specific sports sites.

You join an Affiliate promotions site and find a website that sells extreme sports holidays. You apply to become an affiliate of the extreme sports holiday with a ten percent commission on sales and are provided an advertisers banner (advertising picture with a website link) to promote on your website. This can be anywhere on your website and on each page if you have more than one page. Each time someone visits your website, clicks on the extreme sports holiday promotions banner and purchases a holiday, you get ten percent commission. You check your affiliate commissions after several weeks and are pleasantly pleased to discover you have made quite a nice amount of money coming in on a monthly basis.

Second Option – The Advertiser


You have been both working on your website for quite some time and are relatively happy with the amount of traffic it is receiving. You sell quite a few niche products on your site, but the income is not quite where you want it. You join an Affiliate site, but this time as an advertiser, not an affiliate. You have several banners created for potential affiliates to obtain. You offer 25% commission on each sale an affiliate generates. After several weeks you find that you now have 25 webmasters obtaining your banners. That's 25 other websites that are advertising YOUR website for potential sales. If these newly obtained affiliates potentially generate 2 new sales per website per week and this is on top of your usual website traffic, you see the marketing power it generates. How many websites would potentially become affiliates of your website after a year……?

As you can gather being an Affiliate can attract more potential web traffic to your site as well as generate an additional income.

Being an Advertiser can increase sales for a business (or any other with product sales) website with the potential to have your website become advertised on 10's, 100's, possibly 1000's of other websites.