Vendor Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing Definition. Affiliate Marketing is a revenue sharing model under which merchants/clients/vendors pay affiliates a commission for marketing their products and services on behalf of the merchant. The affiliates receive a fixed payment for their agreed work. The merchants offer free affiliate programs through which merchants can use the expertise and ideas of these affiliates, in turn, to promote their products and services.

In simple words, the way the system works is as follows: the merchant places the links of his products on affiliate networks like ClickBank and later, when a visitor clicks on those links and purchases a product or a service from that particular merchant, the affiliate is paid. That payment is commonly known as a Pay Per Click or PPC ad. There are also affiliate networks that pay their affiliates by points instead of money. The affiliate marketers get paid depending on the action of the visitor to the merchant's site. For example, if a visitor registers with his or her details on the merchant's website, the affiliate gets paid.

However, the nature of affiliate marketing has a dark side too. Many affiliates promote fraud products and services. They earn revenue only for selling a bogus product. Some of the fraudulent vendors may charge a fee for every new sign-up, irrespective of whether the visitor actually purchases any products or services from that particular vendor's site. It is against the rules to charge an affiliate marketing network a fee just because someone visits your web site and signs up.

So, how do you avoid these pitfalls? It is very important to check if the vendor you are considering joining any affiliate marketing program is not a fraud. Do some background check on the vendor. It is recommended that you select two or three vendors to check out. This will give you a better chance to find out if the products or services your vendor is promoting are genuine.

Secondly, you need to decide on which platforms your influencers will be posting their comments and reviews. It is important to choose platforms where your target audience can easily read and respond to the comments. If the platform where you want to promote your affiliate marketing channels does not allow the audience to post comments and reviews, it is time to move on to another platform. There are many platforms available online, including Google and Twitter, that let you target specific audiences.

Thirdly, make sure that your target audience knows about your business and your affiliate marketing strategies. Social media is one of the fastest growing mediums for marketing strategies and information. You need to take advantage of the social media network to spread the word about your products.

Fourthly, you need to drive traffic to your website monetization pages. The most popular form of traffic generation is Facebook and twitter. You should create a page for each of your vendor's products. For example, create a Facebook page for the Alta Vista line of window covering. Then create a Facebook and twitter page for each of the Alta Vista products. Use the same affiliate marketing strategies as before but make sure you drive traffic to the website monetization pages.

Fifthly, you should engage with your influencers. Engaging with your influencers will give you an opportunity to communicate with your audience and improve conversion rates. Never spam your influencers and never reply to every message sent to you. This is counterproductive because your audience will perceive you to be pushy and your messages will be seen as spam.