Affiliate marketing – pros and cons.

As for me affiliate marketing has its pros and cons.
Well, the advantages are:
- more exposure;
- more sales.
On the other hand you will face the commission costs: costly set up and maintenance fees that are associated with a lot of affiliate facilitators.

 

If an affiliate program is set up right it should be a WIN/WIN.
If it's prmoted right you should get enough good affiliates that they make good money and you have enough increased sales to cover all your costs plus make a profit.

 

And with the right affiliate software, an affiliate program can generate hundreds to thousands of backlinks to your site. That feature is almost worth the cost and hassles of an affiliate program by itself.

 

Good point.

 

all businesses have advertising costs, and think of this as building your brand out by exposing them on hundreds/thousands of websites if done well. Can boooooooooom the sales like anything

 

I just wanted to weigh in as well.

Unfortunatly it's on the con side. You can't forget that managing those affiilates will take up a huge chunk of time. Our affiliate program has more than 10,000 between our in-house program and CJ. We have 4 full-time affiliate managers in addition to our Director of marketing to handle all those people and make sure the products are not being marketed illegaly or inapropriatly, and sometimes you still can't prevent things from happening.

But then on the positive side Affiliate sales bring in a good portion of our total sales so we have them to thank for our success.

 

One of the main keys to reducing headaches is to take advantage
of the pros while avoiding the money hassles if you can.

Two approaches that I use are

1) A free viral marketing type approach where the affiliate is
selling directly themself (ie: reseller program)

and

2)
Using the pay your sponsor then you (seperately) approach, such
as when the customer makes two payments. One to your
paypal (or other account) and one to the affiliate directly.

My main members only site works like #2. They still join my database
and still get to brand/customize the site but they collect their
share directly for upgrades.

Mind you I am a programmer by trade and was able to create the system
but there are plenty of scripts (or techies) out there to help you.

 

APM is a full time job, and if it's going well, it's worth the time, effort and resources, in terms of ROI. I feel Amazon has the biggest Affiliate base as of today. Pick up any product from Amazon, and Google it, and see what you get. It's duplicated by affiliates several hunded thousand times !!

 

I felt that the commission for some of the affiliate programs are not guaranteed. this is why this site has catch my eye: getPaidMoreOnline.com. If you are a reseller, you will get paid first, then you pay the author. This based on trust.

Do the judgement yourself at: GetPaidMoreOnline.com