I would like to know which of the following business models is the most effective in the affiliate marketing. My affiliate program gives me a choice of business models and I can choose only one.
Loyalty/Rewards
Select this option if your primary business model is based on loyalty or rewards. For example, your site offers points, donations, or other rewards for purchasing at selected merchants. Loyalty/Reward sites give something back to the consumer in exchange for purchasing through the publisher’s site. A percentage of the advertiser commission is used to pay a reward to the end user. Rewards come in many forms including cash, airline miles, credit card points, or a percent of sale given to an organization.
Coupons/Deals
Select this option if your primary business model is based on offering coupons and deals to your customers.
General Shopping
Select this option if your primary business model is shopping. Shopping sites can be thought of as a virtual mall. The consumer can shop for various products and brands without ever having to leave the site. This type of publisher is not focused specifically on coupons and deals.
Search
Select this option if your primary business model is based on search. Search publishers promote advertisers via search engine marketing (natural or paid).
Price Comparison
Select this option if your primary business model is based on price comparison. Comparison shopping sites sell items where some comparison is made before the purchase. Many times the publisher will have direct product links of the same product from different advertisers.
Content/Niche
Select this option if your primary business model is based on content, such as news stories, media, music, or video. Content sites focus on a specific area of interest. This type of site is normally not a shopping site but users go to the site because they are interested in relevant content on site. Content sites that do well with performance-based marketing blend their area of expertise with product recommendations.
Social Shopping
Select this option if your primary business model is based on social shopping. Social shopping sites usually combine shopping with user recommendations, reviews, lists, and other social network features.
User Generated
Select this option if your primary business model is based on user-generated content such as communities, forums, and social networks.
Other
Select this option if your primary business model does not fall under any of the other categories.
Thanks
Categorized | Affiliate Marketing 101
What Business Model Is The Most Effective In The Affiliate Marketing?
Posted on December 30, 2010.
Essentially, the affiliate marketing business model is also known as the third-party proprietor. It is one of the easiest and most effective methods to get started and make money online. In a nutshell, an affiliate marketer promotes other people’s products via referral and then gets paid a commission for their marketing efforts. This means that as an affiliate marketer, there’s no hassle of having a product of your own, managing payment processors or even handling customer service support.
How an affiliate marketer makes money online is simply by referring customers to the merchant’s sales offer. Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that you can reap a significant share of the profit on each sale, with less than half of the hassle. By a significant share, it ranges anything between 5% all the way up to 75%!
Affiliate marketing has also been growing in popularity in various industries in the recent years. The reason for this is because more and more business owners are realizing the power of affiliate marketing by leveraging on other people’s marketing skills. On the affiliate marketing end, it is so easy because affiliates avoid the trouble on product creation and customer support. Yet as an affiliate, they still get to practice all the essential marketing skills that will bring successes into any business.
The first thing you need to understand about affiliate marketing is that it is a “pay per action” model. Affiliate marketing works by having an arrangement between the merchant, also known as the product vendor, and the affiliate marketer. Only when an affiliate successfully sells a product or generates a lead, which is the action, then the merchant pays the affiliate a commission.
In other words, the affiliate marketer gets compensated based on either the visitors they referred make a purchase or fill out a form by providing their contact information. The affiliate then gets rewarded with commission, which can range between 5 – 75% of the product price.
This referral process works by using a unique link that allows tracking for both the merchant and the affiliate. Therefore, when an affiliate is doing their promotion, the sales will most definitely be accredited to the affiliate. The merchant on the other hand will notice which affiliate is performing well and in some cases, provide incentives or resources to assist in the affiliate marketing process.
Lets look at the process flow of the affiliate marketing model. We begin with the affiliate marketer.Very simply an affiliate marketer visits an affiliate network to find a merchant and a product to promote.Some of the examples of affiliate networks out there are Commission Junction, PayDotCom, and Link Share.
Basically, an affiliate network is a market place which brings affiliates and merchants together. The affiliate network company also handles all tracking and payment processes.When an affiliate identifies a product from the market place that could be profitable to promote, what the affiliate does is to set up a campaign and send targeted traffic to the merchant’s sales offer. This targeted traffic will be the merchant’s potential customers.Thereafter, when a sale or lead is successfully transacted, the merchant then pays the affiliate marketer the stipulated commission.