Affiliate
Marketing-Consistent And Profitable
In November 1994, just after the world wide web was born, a company
called CDNOW came up with an online way of selling called
“BuyWeb” – a click through purchasing
set-up that functioned independently from the storefront. This was the
first profitable form of home based business affiliate, and many other
online and e-commerce sites soon followed suite with similar programs
(Amazon.com being an example.) Affiliate Marketing has now become a
consistent method of advertising and selling, and now forms a large
part of many company’s marketing strategies. It is cheap,
effective, and has little to no risk for all involved home based
business affiliate. 1
Traditionally, affiliate marketing functioned on cost-per-click
systems, which means that the ‘affiliate’ was paid
for every advert or email clicked on or from their website. However,
due to many fraudsters taking advantage of this system by using spam
techniques, doing false advertising, creating ad-ware, using forced
click techniques, doing SEO ‘keyword stuffing’,
using tracking cookies and many similar techniques, the cost-per click
system is not as popular as it once was.1
Merchants now rather use CPA (Cost-per-action) or CPS (cost-per-sale)
techniques – both being very similar in that an affiliate
receives commission or a revenue share when a person subscribes to the
merchant or buys a product from them from being referred by the
affiliate’s site. These methods present little to no risk for
both the merchant and the affiliate, and are therefore preferred.
However, Google’s new Latent Semantic Indexing could mean
that CPS will become risk free as well (Latent Semantic Indexing will
automatically fish out websites with nonsensical content, or that have
keyword stuffing or are advertising sites that are not comparison or
shopping sites.)
|
