Affiliate Marketing – What You Should Know

Affiliate marketing is gaining popularity day by day because of the increasing consciousness amongst the masses about it. Merchants as well as the affiliates have realized that affiliate marketing proves beneficial for both of them. Affiliate marketing gives the merchant the opportunity to advertise their products at a low cost while the affiliates find affiliate marketing as an easy way to earn money online and that too by doing something that they could enjoy

The perception of people about affiliate marketing has undergone a sea change with the rising popularity of affiliate marketing. Today, no one considers affiliate marketing as an alternative method of advertisement of products by a merchant or as a source of additional income for an affiliate. As of now, affiliate marketing has become the main source of profits and revenues for many the merchants and affiliates.

Now, there can be a number of questions that could be asked about affiliate marketing. For example, what type of affiliate program should one opt for or does all affiliate marketing programs accrue the same benefit or are all the affiliate marketing programs the same deep down or are there affiliate marketing programs that prove to be more beneficial than the others.

It is true that there are different types of affiliate marketing but these types surely depend on the way one classifies them. However, fundamentally affiliate marketing programs can be classified into two heads-pay per click (PPC) and pay per performance (PPP).

o PAY PER CLICK (PPC) AND PAY PER PERFORMANCE (PPP)

PPC is the most popular as well as the easiest way of earning money for affiliates having smaller websites. An affiliate gets paid when a visitor is referred to his site i.e. when a user clicks through the merchant’s banner or text ads. This payment to the affiliate does not depend on whether the visitor makes any actual purchase on the merchant’s site. Contrary to that, under PPP affiliate marketing the affiliate gets paid only if the referred visitor actually makes any purchase or if the referred visitor turns into a lead. Due to this difference, the returns on PPC for an affiliate would be comparatively less than PPP. PPP affiliate marketing is considered a better bet for both the merchant as well as for the affiliates.

Similarly Pay Per Performance (PPP) affiliate marketing has yet been classified into two categories: – pay per sales (PPS) and pay per lead (PPL). As the name suggests under the PPS system, the affiliate only gets paid if actual sales is made while under PPL affiliate system, the affiliate gets paid if the visitor fills up an application form or any such similar form related to business of the company. This kind of system is used by companies which depend on leads for their growth like finance and insurance companies.

o SINGLE TIER, TWO TIERS AND MULTI TIER AFFILIATE MARKETING

These are different types of affiliate marketing programs depending on the depth of the affiliate network. If the affiliates only get paid on the basis of direct sales or traffic that he has referred to the merchant’s site (for example-PPS, PPL and PPC), this kind of program comes under single tier affiliate marketing. Similarly, if he gets paid for the direct traffic that he has referred and also for every traffic or sales that has been made by affiliates recommended by him, he comes under the two tier affiliate marketing. In multi tier affiliate program, the affiliate gets paid like two tiers but besides that he also gets paid for other affiliates in different tiers in the affiliate network.

Advertising and Its Types to Improve Business

The global market is changing day in and day out. Every company is trying desperately to get an edge over its competitors. This sense of competition is heightened by the growing number of consumers. Advertising has become the modern day tool for these companies who are always looking to strengthen their client base. But before we proceed with advertising, one has to know what it stands for. In simple words advertising is nothing but the act of promoting one’s product in the market. Any kind of good commercial advertising should also be able to persuade hosts of customers to increase their consumption of a particular product.

Consumers of the present times are driven by brands. These brands managed to become household names primarily because of their advertising campaigns. Advertising has become the tried and tested formula that company’s use to create high demand for their manufactured products. Today advertising is being used by a number of sectors like religious groups, political parties, governmental agencies and many more. These organizations have realized the worth of promoting themselves to a larger population.

Advertising has its roots in ancient Egypt where people used to distribute wall posters, sales messages written on papyrus. With time these gave way to a more modern format of using billboards. In fact billboards are believed to be the starting point of product oriented advertising. Over the years this canon of promoting items through ads has been split into a number of groups. Here is a list of these branches or types of advertising. There are basically four basic kinds of advertising. These may be described as the following:

1) Print advertising: This is one of the earliest forms of advertising that people followed before the outbreak of electronic devices like radio, television etc. Print advertising is basically restricted to trade journals, magazines and newspapers. Newspapers are the biggest reason behind the ongoing popularity of print advertising.

2) Radio advertising: Radio was a favorable medium for promotion consumer goods until the invention of television sets.

3) Television: Television is considered to be the biggest medium of advertising. Television commercials help companies reach out to millions of consumers worldwide urging them to try out their products. One major characteristic about television advertisements is that it uses a jingle along with its visuals to grab the attention of consumers. In fact this television advertising has given birth to a new form of promotional strategy termed as infomercials. These infomercials are usually longer advertisements that try to convince buyers by showcasing demos. A standard infomercial starts with duration of five minutes, but may vary depending on the nature of the product.

4) Online advertising: Internet has become one of the best platforms for companies willing to advertise their products. Online advertising basically tries to convey marketing messages to draw the attention of netizens. The most common forms of internet advertising are email-marketing, online classifieds, social network advertising, banner advertisements, search engine advertising and the list just goes on and on.

There are also a number of other advertising tricks like billboards advertising, mobile-billboard marketing, covert advertising that continue to influence the minds of millions of buyers. All these advertising techniques are giving way to new genres of product marketing. Thus the future of advertising seems to be perfectly bright as more and more companies come up with their range of products. If you are having desire to find good advertising of your websites or products then you can get good help of Shri Sahu Services and Shri Sharma Services which will provide you good marketing of your site and products.

 

Introduction to Online Advertising

Our next lesson covers the main items for online advertising. Advertising is probably the most important promotion tool for big brick-and-mortar companies. However, with a SEM businesses, advertising is only a supporting factor. The problem is that the majority of SEM businesses lack the scale to be able to effectively contact large numbers of prospects and clients. Furthermore, there aren’t many places on the Web where prospective clients come in flocks. Therefore, advertising is largely PPC-oriented.

Actually, online advertising is advertising on the Internet. This particular form of advertising is a source of revenue for an increasing number of websites and companies.

A significant number of firms, from small businesses to multinational corporations, incorporate online advertising into their marketing strategy. Online advertisements typically involve at least two separate firms: the advertiser or agency which purchases or sponsors the advertisement and the publisher or network which distributes the ad for display. Because of the close relationship between technical innovation and online advertising, many firms specialize in both. For example, most search engines couple their search service with an advertising program, exploiting the benefits of keyword-based search technology by including ads in search results.

Let’s look closer on the most popular online advertising form as traditional banner. PPC advertising form will be explained in details in 8 lessons of our next Step.

Traditional Banner
A Web banner or banner ad is a widely used form of advertising on the Internet. This kind of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a Web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking them to the advertiser’s website.

Generally the advertisement is constructed from an image (GIF, JPEG, PNG), JavaScript program or multimedia object employing technologies such as Java, Shockwave or Flash, and often employing animation or sound to maximize presence. Images are usually in a high-aspect ratio shape. Banners are usually placed on Web pages that have interesting content, such as a newspaper article or an opinion piece.

The Web banner is displayed when a Web page that references the banner is loaded into a Web browser. This event is known as an “impression“. When the viewer clicks on the banner, the viewer is directed to the website advertised in the banner. This event is known as a “click-through”. Many banner ads work on a click-through payback system.

At the base of a click-through system are mathematical calculations of the number of users (users clicking on an ad) divided by impression number. We remember that the term impression means the number of times the ad was delivered. For example, if your banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and 1 person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1%.

It should be noted that banner ad click-through rates have fallen over time, often measuring significantly less than 1% and choice of an appropriate advertising site with high affinity is very important crucial factor in this situation. Personalized ads, unusual formats, and more obtrusive ads typically have higher click-through rates than standard banner ads.

When the advertiser scans their log files and detects that a Web user has visited the advertiser’s site from the content site by clicking on the banner ad, the advertiser sends the content provider a small amount of money (usually around five to ten US cents). This payback system is often how the content provider is able to pay for the Internet access to supply the content in the first place.

Advantages of Pay Per Click Advertising

What are the main advantages to be had from marketing your business online via pay per click advertising?

1. Anything from a local to global audience at the touch of a button
The first top advantage of pay per click advertising is that worth nothing is the fact that you can easily select the focus and scale of your target audience at the click of a button in your account.

If you want to focus your online advertising on a small, localized area, within a few square miles of your business or store, you can choose to do so. If you want to advertise your products or services across more than one continent, you can choose to do so thanks to the technical advantages of PPC.

Being able to geographically target your audience is a huge pay per click advertising advantage, particularly because the boundaries that you set can be changed at any time. There are also lots of other ways to continue targeting your audience, such as their social or cultural preferences which can be gleaned from your audience’s social networking activities for example.

When using print advertising or other forms of online advertising, it is very difficult to get this kind of control over your target audience. The advantage is in the control and freedom that you have regarding geographical targeting.

2. Online advertising that is financially accessible to all
The second main advantage is the fact that you can advertise via pay per click regardless of your budget.

PPC is an effective form of online advertising that can be run on anything from a few dollars a month to millions of dollars a month. Regardless of the amount of money that you spend on your pay per click advertising, it can also still be highly successful, which is another advantage to bear in mind.

It is not how much money you spend that counts. It is how that money which you invest is spent which will start to bring in new clients and new customers to your business.

The advantage of paid search advertising as opposed to other kinds of online advertising or print advertising is the fact that you can achieve fantastic results from that advertising on any budget whatsoever.

3. Making changes is quick and easy
If you use print advertising to market your business, it is very difficult, expensive and time-consuming when you want to make changes to that advertising campaign. When you advertise, the third advantage is the fact that making changes to your campaign costs nothing (unless you are changing how much you are spending) and can be done at the click of a mouse.

You can make changes to the advertisement text within your advertisements, you can make changes to the times of day when your advertisements are shown, you can make changes to the landing pages on your website that your advertisements lead to. All of these changes can be made within a few minutes. It is that simple.

The list of what you can change is endless and therefore the advantage lies in the ease and speed at which you can market your business via this medium.

4. Development and improvement using advertising tools is never ending
The fourth advantage comes in the form of ppc tools which are under constant development and designed to make your pay per click advertising campaigns even more successful every time.

For example, if you need help optimizing your campaigns, you can use Google Analytics to make sure that you make informed decisions. You can also use other pay per click advertising tools to run a second campaign in secret for a period of time. In this way you can test out theories for that campaign to see what kind of results you might get from that campaign. All of this can be done as a test run without actually running the campaign for real and having to invest money into it.

Paid search experts are developing and improving these tools every day. These developments are never ending. The constant development behind the scenes is another clear advantage for all the advertisers who market their businesses using this medium.

Feeling constantly supported is nothing but a clear advantage to be had from marketing via this kind of advertising.