Understanding The Benefits To An Online Affiliate Marketing Program - 2

By Author: Mark Madson
Total Articles: 2
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Financial benefits and more

The ultimate benefit, as stated, is increased success. Technological advances continue to offer strategic thinkers new ways of establishing and maintaining close relationships with their affiliates since, after all, personal relationships with mutual trust are key. With the advent of such Web 2.0 services as blogging and interactive Web communities, the affiliate marketing world is becoming a more intimate, more trusting environment.

Because of the new levels of trust and the rise of "cyber communitarianism," it is increasingly difficult for fly-by-night firms to succeed for even a short while. Communication is instant, and there are watchdogs a-plenty scoping out Internet activity day and night, around the world. Very little happens in the affiliate marketing community that is not discussed and dissected in a thousand ways on a hundred sites.

The financial benefit of improved communication, of course, is a reduction in losses to unscrupulous marketers and more information being made available on active individuals and firms. Where information is freely available and actively ...
... disseminated - where the "light shines," so to speak - it is harder and harder for crooks to hide in shadows. The open and candid nature of the online affiliate marketing industry confers such additional benefits as reputation, referrals and, once again, trust.

Making money

The models and methods by which affiliate marketers earn their money are varied, and in constant flux on the implementation level owing to continuing technological progress. The numbers are always in flux, too, but it would not be particularly inaccurate to say that some 80 of 100 affiliate programs working today use some form of revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) for compensation. Another 18 or so use a cost per action (CPA) formula, while the remainder use such other methods as cost per click (CPC) and cost per mille/thousand (CPM).

The one or two percent of firms using the CPC and CPM methods are usually in the paid search and display advertising fields. CPC used to be more common, especially early on, but the large amount of fraud perpetrated by computer-savvy crooks nearly eliminated that methodology completely.

Bottom line

Finally, another powerful benefit of affiliate marketing has to do with what it isn't, rather than what it is - it isn't MLM (Multi-Level Marketing). In fact, most affiliate programs are "one tier" designs, with a few two-tier firms making up a small minority. When a program evolves into a "hierarchy" of sign-ups, prospects, sub-partners, uplines and downlines, these become a different animal entirely, namely, network marketing or MLM.

In the final analysis, you need to understand that, as far as online affiliate marketing, there will never be a final analysis. That is to say, things change quickly, with both strategies and tactics, so you need to stay abreast of the issues in the industry, new developments and improved techniques. As we have seen, however, the major benefits of an online affiliate marketing program are flexibility, variety, transparency, controllable and predictable costs, opportunities for building trust and the chance to build an effective community effort.

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