What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a referral-based, revenue-sharing marketing strategy, in which you (a Merchant) pay your Affiliates a commission for referring business to your website.

You do not pay for advertising with their Affiliates - you only pay when a sale, lead, download, subscription or other desired action occurs.

An example
A webmaster signs up as a new affiliate in your MyAP-powered program. He gets his affiliate login ID and default banner code.

He then logs in to his affiliate administration page, and collects some marketing material for his site (including an article, two banners of varying sizes, rotating banner code, and a web ad). He places the article on his website.

A visitor reads the article, and interested to find out more, clicks through to your website. The visitor decides to purchase your product and goes through your order form.

MyAP recognizes that the sale was referred by the affiliate, so it credits the affiliate's account with a commission.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

How Can Affiliate Marketing Help Me?

Affiliate Marketing is a cost effective medium in which to deliver brand awareness on a pay-for-performance basis. It offers a low customer acquisition cost because you're paying only when visitors convert into customers/leads.

With Affiliate Marketing, you can identify new markets that you may not have thought about in the past. Your affiliates can introduce your products and services to their niche markets using their own channels at no additional cost to your business. You may find out through an affiliate's success that there is an untapped market niche you have been neglecting.

Affiliate marketing can help you identify strategic partners. Remember, Affiliate Marketing isn't just for consumers. Business to business (B2B) Affiliate Marketing can help you find new B2B partners. Read our pdf file 'B2B Affiliate Marketing: Can It Work?' for more information.

Through Affiliate Marketing, you can place your products and services where non-searchers will find them.

Am I a Merchant or an Affiliate?

With all of the online marketing buzz words being thrown around - it can start to get a little confusing. So, we understand that you may be sitting back thinking, 'Am I a merchant or am I an affiliate?'

The Affiliate Marketing encyclopedia, Affilipedia.com, describes the terms merchant and affiliate in the following way:

Merchant is an online business that markets and sells goods or services. Merchants establish affiliate programs as a cost effective method to get consumers to purchase a product, register for a service, fill out a form, or visit a Web site.

Affiliate is a Web site owner that earns a commission for referring clicks, leads, or sales to a merchant.

'Affiliate' is a group or person officially linked to an organization.

If you have a website on which you sell something or through which you accept leads and you'd like to pay other website owners, bloggers and email list owners for sending you sales or leads - you are a merchant.

If you have a website, a blog or an email list that you'd like to use to generate interest in specific merchants, products or services and you'd like to earn commissions by sending your contacts to those merchants - you are an affiliate.

If you are still asking yourself whether you're a merchant or an affiliate, you may actually be both. There are several merchants that have affiliate programs, receive traffic from affiliates, give affiliates commissions for the transactions they refer AND they themselves refer traffic to other merchants in return for commissions on the transactions made by those visitors.

How Do I Get Started?

Merchants can get started here at MyAffiliateProgram.com. Give us a call to talk to a trained professional in our office to hear how affiliate marketing will work for you and how KowaBunga! Technologies can help you meet your goals.

Affiliates should click over to Kolimbo.com to learn more about becoming an affiliate. You can sign up for our network of affiliate programs for free. Once you've joined, you'll have access to our extensive Affiliate Training Center where you can read more about affiliate marketing or talk to our live representatives for more help.

Where Can I Learn More about Affiliate Marketing?

AffiliateManager.net - The Affiliate Manager site is geared towards those just getting started with affiliate programs, as well as affiliate marketing veterans.

AffiliateTip.com - Affiliate Tip is a free resource to help affiliates with affiliate programs, as well as a guide as to how to promote affiliate programs, and which affiliate programs to promote.

AffiliateBoards.com - Forum dedicated to Affiliate Marketing.

AffiliateManager.net Forums - Forum dedicated to Affiliate Marketing managers.

ReveNews.com - Unbiased news & opinions about the afiliate marketing industry since 1998.

AffiliateClassroom.com - learn everything you need to know to become a better afiliate.

More About MyAP

More Affiliate Marketing Solutions from Kowabunga

MyCPANet
Complete CPA Network technology solution. For more information, visit www.MyCPANet.com.

Outsourced Management Service
Hands free affiliate program strategy creation and execution. For more information, click here.