Affiliate
Programs
The use of affiliate
programs can encourage others promote your site and your products. A
simple way to get started is to use a network like Commission
Junction.
In brief, this is
software that allows one web site (the affiliate) to carry links to
another (the merchant), and get paid a commission for sales, leads etc.
This could work for any site, although it relies on there being relevant
potential affiliate sites who can deliver traffic.
We would like to
emphasise the benefit here, of considering the use of affiliate programs
as part of the core strategy of the online business, from the outset.
Two drivers to this:
1) the structure
of the shop and the type of shop software is uses, could enable (or
prevent) "deep linking" to individual products. The benefit
of deep linking is that people can promote individual items in context,
and the customer is only one click from buying it on your site. The
best examples of this are Amazon
or Kitbag.
2) having your own
software such as My
Affiliate Program or AffiliateWiz,
can enable you to run your own program and reinforce the link count
direct into your own domain - which improves your site and page performance
on the engines.
Whether you run
your own program or not, you still face a lot of work to find sites
to join it. Even then there are online services that can help. There
are a large number of announcement sites that are visited by potential
affiliates scouting for lucrative new programs. To save you the hassle,
you can now pay an announcement service to place it in all the announcement
sites, at Announce
Service.
