How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Ensure Your Success

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How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Ensure Your Success

by Thom Schlip

I've been thinking about how affiliate marketing has been shaping online business recently and it occurred to me that with so many new businesses coming on the Internet everyday that now might be a good time to provide an affiliate marketing overview while going easy on detailed initiatives. Lets start with the simple formula for business success and then apply it to how we can use affiliate marketing to increase your business revenue.

THE 3 STEP FORMULA FOR SUCCESS
It doesn't matter what business you are in; business success will always revolve around a simple 3-step formula. Merchants need to acquire so many nonqualified prospects (step1) to turn them into qualified prospects (step2) to make so many new sales (step 3).

Once the merchant achieves step 3 (the sale), the merchant starts the cycle all over again. Selling has been and always will be a numbers game. Accordingly, there are always two determinants of sales success. The first key is to reduce the time it takes to get from step 1(unqualified prospects) to step 3 (a sale). The second key to success is to multiply the amount of times the merchant completes this cycle. Affiliate Marketing expedites this process.

In its basic form, Affiliate Marketing is a form of "Revenue Sharing" that occurs when a web site agrees to sell/advertise or promote another businesses products or services in exchange for a commission. The parties involved are typically called "Merchants" and "Affiliates". Merchant sites are those sites that pay other web sites for sending referrals or sales. Affiliate sites are those sites that earn commissions by referring customers to the merchant sites. A single web site can act as both a merchant and an affiliate. In fact, as Business 2 Business E-commerce continues to grow the definition of what a merchant and affiliate is will blur.

Affiliate programs are an invaluable part of the marketing success for online merchants and are reshaping how business is done over the Internet. With online sales expected to dominate overall retail sales from this point in time on it's critical that all companies and webmasters learn how to maximize its potential, efficiency and effectiveness.

To understand the importance of affiliate programs for online merchants, it is crucial to review how merchants have advertised in the past. Previously, a merchant paid outrageous prices for advertising with no guarantees of performance. They HOPED for sales and paid on advertising effort, not results. With Affiliate programs, the merchant only pays for an ad if and when a sale is made. This is a marketers haven and properly used this type of performance-based advertising is extremely profitable for all involved. There is one Universal Truth in business: everything you do brings you closer to or further away from a sale. Either an action performed by your business helps expedite present and future business or it suggests to a prospect or customer that they should be doing business elsewhere.

Having an affiliate program immediately moves the merchant closer to a sale by removing step 1 (the time draining practice of attracting nonqualified prospects) from the equation. Now a merchant literally can have hundreds, even thousands of affiliates selling its products and services to an audience targeted to its particular clientele within days of starting their affiliate program (especially when using one of the affiliate solution providers who recruit affiliates for you.)

Merchants can easily accomplish this without incurring the advertising, recruiting, managing, tracking, payment and overhead costs typically associated with adding new salespeople. Best of all, merchants can do it all from any computer that has Internet access in the world, with a simple web interface, in just seconds. This will bring the merchants more sales and in less time than they ever dreamed possible.

Thom Schlip, tschlip@Plugingo.com is the CEO of www.PlugInGo.com a leading affiliate marketing company for small and medium size businesses. FREE! A Guaranteed way to Click and Grow Rich! What's the easiest way to make money online? Simple--Get paid when people click their mouse! How? Join one of the world's largest affiliate networks. You get a $10 bonus to just sign-up, place a link on your site, and have someone--(even you)--click on it http://www.plugingo.com/index.cfm?Action=A_Join&NewMode=A