Authored by Ted Goodman in Internet Marketing
Published on 11-19-2008
The idea of affiliate marketing is to have partnerships with several websites and institutions that could link your potential customers to your website and/or business for direct transactions. You pay your affiliates based on the number of hits your website has from the link that they provided, which is something your domain could tally for you. Affiliate marketing brings into your business model all sorts of convenience and potential for expansion. It takes care of an important aspect of your business – the advertising side – without you covering for all the expenses necessary to make it happen.
But before you could make all these get rolling, you must be able to secure some preliminary things for your business. What follows is a list of items you have to prepare before you go all out on affiliate marketing:
A website. Most definitely, you need a website for the potential customers to visit so they could know more about your products and services. The website is where the advertisement and write-ups of your affiliate marketing partners would lead your customers to. Setting up a website is not difficult to do. Look amongst your friends and you might be able to find someone who could design your website for free. Make sure that your website on a domain that traffic. Choose a domain name that is catchy and easy to remember; if it is possible to use your business name as the name of your website, that would be most helpful. Be sure that in your websites, feedback mechanisms are available: contact details, email address, subscription application for your announcements and products, and comments/spaces for further inquiries. The main point is, you have to be able to catch your customers’ interest and keep them hooked in every aspect of the website, and to give them all possible ways of making yourself available.
A monitoring team. If you are doing your business full time, then you could be the one to monitor the activities required in the website – all the updating, getting in touch with your affiliates, and responding to the inquiries of the customers. In the beginning, the work load could be something you could handle alone. But later on, monitoring your business activities and responding to them needs someone else to help you. You could make a team out of your employees or you could hire account managers to take care of specific aspects of this. The team does not have to be huge. What matters is that its members are efficient and effective in doing their job.
These might appear simple but most businesses miss out on the items that are mentioned above. And when the time comes that they have to deal with the business issues, they have to redo whatever that have already done to accommodate to contingencies. And you would not want that. Treat this as a gentle reminder to be future-oriented, and to build everything today in anticipation to the possibilities that business expansion and affiliate marketing could give you.
