Online Marketing Tips Video: What Is Affiliate Marketing?

By Li Evans

This week we're bringing Donna McCarthy of DCM Consulting back to explain all about Affiliate Marketing.  There was a slight mix up in our tapings, we filmed Donna twice, once before she explained the difference between Network Client Services verse Outsourced Program Management when it comes to choosing who to run your affiliate program.  That's actually the video that should have came today.... we here at SMG messed up!

Today we're bringing you the "What is Affiliate Marketing Video" that was suppose to air back on July 8th.  It's still quite relevant and a pretty informing video.  Donna's one of the best in the businesses, and she shares her knowledge of the different types of affiliate publishers out there.

Full video transcript after the jump...

What Is Affiliate Marketing Video Transcript

Hi and welcome back to Tuesday's Tips.  My name's Donna McCarthy from Search Marketing Gurus and DMC Affliate Consulting.  In today's tips we're going to talk about Affiliate Marketing.

Driving Revenue Through Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is online revenue channel.  Where you would drive revenue to your site from an affiliate.  So to take that back a little bit, as you are a merchant, you would take your banner and you would give that to your network of publishers.  The publishers would place your banner on their website.  Any revenue that is driven to your site from an affiliate, the affiliate would earn commissions based on an offer that you put out there for them.  They would drive that off to your site, you would get the revenue and they would get a portion of that revenue.  Its called Pay for Performance Marketing.  Its another way or another term that people use to describe affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketers Can Be Loyalty Sites

There's various types of affiliate publishers out there.  An affiliate can be anything from a loyalty site, such as a U-Promise, to an E-bates or an I-Give.  Something like that where the consumer would get a benefit from shopping at that site multiple times.

Comparison Shopping Engines Are Affiliate Sites, Too

Another kind of affiliate website would be a comparison shopping engine.  Where there would be various types of merchants that would feed all of their information to this website.  Then you can see your products as compared to other merchants.

Deal or Coupon Sites are the Most Popular Type of Affiliates

Another type of affiliate website is a deal site or coupon site.  This is the most popular type of affliate site.  You would take your coupon code, or your special offers, free shipping or percentages off, something like that.  The affiliates would put that on their websites, so their primary goal for those affiliates is to drive consumers to those sites, because they are known for for the deals and types of specials and offers that they have.

Search Affiliates Invest Their Own Revenue To Drive Traffic

The last type of affiliate is called a search affiliate.  Those affiliates really their traffic is primarily driven by the types of search terms that they put out there.  So they will actually take their own revenue and they'll invest that into search marketing to get more traffic driven to their site. So they found its more beneficial for them to  do search to drive affiliate to their sites.

Affiliate Must First Drive Traffic To Their Site, Then To Your Site

An important thing about affiliate marketing is that these affiliates must drive traffic directly to their site first before they drive it to your site.  That's one of the things we watch very carefully for in affiliate marketing.  To make sure that those affiliates are pirating your domain and sending them directly to your site.  We want to make sure that they are sending to them to their site first than to your site.

Affiliates Market Their Sites in Various Ways

There's various types of ways that these affiliates will go about marketing.  Some of them will do their own natural search marketing strategy.  Some of them will actually invest in paid search to drive traffic to their site.  Overall this can be a very beneficial channel for you as well as the affiliate.  The more traffic that they are driving to your site the more revenue they are driving to the site, the more revenue you are making and then also the more revenue that they are making as part of that partnership deal that they have together.

That's all I have for today for affiliate marketing.  Stop back next week and learn more about affiliate tips or search marketing tips from Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing.  Thank you!

Comments

[Internet Affiliate Program]

However, being in this kind of a business requires more than just sales skills. You should have industry knowledge and the acumen to differentiate between the genuine and fake. Your success or failure will depend on choosing the right internet affiliate program and affiliate promotion strategies.

[Amyrhiz]

Nice tips on video. :-) Affiliate marketing will successful if you will truly invest your effort and time. :-)

[Amyrhiz]

Great post. Affiliate marketing is really a good source of money plus you can work at home. Good advantage. :-)