Friday 16 December 2011

AFFILIATE MARKETING PROCESS

Affiliate marketing process kicks off once the merchants and affiliates gets linked with a mutual agreement with the help of intermediary. A dedicated web interface designed by the Intermediary for Affiliate and Merchant acts as the link between the three parties. These interfaces provide vital information to the linked parties for deciding and reaching an agreement. Based on the product’s promotion offers in the merchant’s site, affiliate can contact the merchant to place the link of their ad in affiliate’s site or vice-versa.

A typical category of affiliates requires special mention as they get auto approved the moment they apply to the merchants as they fall under an exceptional class named “Special Affiliates” who have created an extraordinary reputation in the online marketing world by their advanced marketing strategies. 

AD’s & OFFERS 
A systematic process runs behind the creation of ads & offers and affiliate getting access of the AD links created by the merchants.

Merchants with the assistance of interface provided by intermediary create different types of promotional Ad links like text, banners, Individual products, mobile banner, mobile text, etc links which are required to drive its product into the target market.

Merchant defines certain criteria based on which the affiliate receives commission for each click/lead/sale it generates. Offer is the crucial business concept using which the affiliate comes to an agreement with the merchant with regards to the commission/compensation that they would earn based on the clicks/sales/impressions/leads generated for the merchant product/business.

Offers can be public or private

    Public: All affiliates joined with a merchant can take part in a public offer in promoting their product with equal interest.
    Private: Private offer is targeted on a certain group of affiliates based on the interest of the merchant and those affiliates only will take part in promotion of merchant’s products.

Merchant defines the public or private offer with one or more of the payout models described below, and The AD links are created and linked with these offers and provided to a specific affiliate capable of marketing it or to all affiliates with whom the merchant is partnered with. The choice of which affiliates to use lies at the sole discretion of the merchant.

Affiliate gets access of the link code of the AD links once they get partnered with the merchant and their offers. These links are placed in affiliate sites where it is expected to capture the attention of end users/ consumers and induce a click resulting in a sale of the product.

Data-feed(promotion technique) is a digital inventory of products to be sold online which includes information such as, a deep link to location on site, a link to an image of the product, a description, the price, reference ID and category. This information is used by merchant’s affiliates to highlight merchant’s products individually. SALES/TRANSACTION TRACKING MET

Keep Looking this space for the AFFILIATE MARKETING PROCESS Continued...
Next is SALES/TRANSACTION TRACKING METHODS !!!

Wednesday 14 December 2011

AFFILIATE MARKETING DEMYSTIFIED

By now we are sure that the reader is familiar with the target user perspective of Affiliate Marketing where in the user clicks ads on some website resulting in a possible sale. The following section aims at highlighting the various background processes and entities involved in the successful delivery of an Affiliate marketing campaign. Below is a depiction of a typical Affiliate Marketing working model






ENTITIES INVOLVED The chief protagonist is the “Intermediary” whose responsibility is to orchestrate all interactions between the “Affiliate” and the “Merchant”. The roles of the “Merchant”, “Affiliate” and the “Intermediary” are elaborated below.


A. Merchant:
Merchants are product owners in any business domain looking to popularize or sell their products worldwide utilizing Internet marketing as a strategy.

B. Affiliate:
Affiliate is an individual or a group with the capability to influence and induce a larger group of internet users to buy merchants products. Affiliates are categorized under various categories like Food & Drinks, Fashion & Beauty, Automotives, Computer & Technology, Career and employment, Retail, Financial services, Insurance, Real estate, Software etc depending on the type of products they intend to take up from merchant for sale promotion.

C. Intermediary:
Role of intermediary is to help merchants promote their products by getting them linked to potential affiliates in the market or vice versa. Intermediary receives monetary benefits from the merchant for efficiently managing the affiliate-merchant network & payments. Intermediary thereby helps to run affiliate marketing in a controlled environment ensuring equitable remuneration to affiliates based on the results achieved. The intermediary (technology firm) delivers the technical model in the form of web interface/product to merchants and affiliates and earns a portion of commission based on the transactions taking place between affiliate and merchant. The intermediary provides the complete technical Infrastructure including Ad & Click servers, transaction tracking servers for tracking of clicks, sales/transactions, impressions and leads. The intermediary assumes complete responsibility for maintaining a fruitful association (ensure deserving remuneration to affiliates) between affiliate and merchant.

Tuesday 13 December 2011

AFFILIATE MARKETING-An Eagle’s View

“In e-commerce industry affiliate marketing can be simply defined as a web based marketing technique by which a group (affiliates) or an individual (affiliate) gets remunerated by the product/business owners (merchants) for promoting their products or consumables.”



Internet users come across various AD links placed on commercial websites which are designed to capture their attention and elicit a click eventually leading to a possible sale/end user acquiring the product. From an end user perspective this process seems very simple, however such a seemingly innocuous activity is a result of complex background processes involving a number of independent players and complex mechanisms of crediting a sale and calculating the remunerations for all participants in the value chain.
Affiliate marketing is used by product owners in various domains like Food & Drinks, Fashion & Beauty, Automotives, Computer & Technology, Career and employment, Retail etc to target internet users by leveraging marketing strategies of affiliates specialized in these real world domains. Affiliate/s endeavor is to direct consumers/end users to the product owner’s (merchant) website to augment product popularity and thereby promoting product sales. This is done by placing ad links of Products/Merchant Company on their websites which eventually route the consumers/end users to these product sites.
Rewards in the form of commission are awarded to affiliate/s based on the business leads/sales or popularity (clicks) it brings to the products/Merchant company. One of salient features of Affiliate marketing is that it is based on a pay for performance model and involves no upfront cost to the merchant. As Affiliate marketing becomes more ubiquitous, technological innovations in support of affiliate – merchant networks are gathering pace.

Monday 12 December 2011

AFFILIATE MARKETING A Propeller for Internet Marketing




“Affiliate Marketing- Redefining Power of Ad Space”
It is forgone conclusion that Internet marketing is destined to cross new frontiers in the near future. Analysts predict that by year 2015, Internet marketing spend is likely to exceed $250 billion. According to Gartner over 3 billion of the world's adult population is expected to transact electronically using mobile or Internet. What could be the fitting marketing strategy to capture the eyeballs and wallets of these humongous numbers of internet users is a billion dollar question. Our research and experience leads us to conclude that a number of internet marketing strategies working in tandem would be necessary to address this massive and disparate audience. Among the various internet marketing strategies currently in vogue, “Affiliate Marketing” the subject of this paper, is definitely amongst the most important weapon in the hands of an astute internet marketing strategist. This white paper will explore all aspects of Affiliate marketing including its current & future business scope, working principles, technical model, benefits & beneficiaries. This blog also attempts to identify technology areas where an IT service provider can effectively contribute.