Last week we launched our new Internet Marketing Affiliate scheme. The program provides Internet & Marketing professional a way of increasing revenue without additional cost or risks. It also provides business people with connections to these groups of companies and professionals with a way of earning revenue through a multi-tiered payments. We have created a short video which describes the scheme and an example of the payment tiers.

Like me, I’m sure you’re tired of seeing the same old junk SPAM online about some get rich quick schemes. This SPAM seams to be everywhere, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, email, just everywhere. You click a link and up come some guys sitting on a beach and they tell you that they earn $100,000 per month and all they do is sit on their rear ends all day. If only life were that simple?

We all know these are scams, they are just an Internet spin on an old, and in many countries illegal, practise called Pyramid Selling. It’s a real shame that this is happening as the actual channel of affiliate marketing is fast becoming one of the main driving forces behind online commerce.

In fact in 2007 sales generated by affiliates grew by an estimated 45% on the previous year which attributed £3 billion^* to the affiliate marketing channel. The amount of growth slowed in 2008, which we feel is down to the financial situation we have all experienced, but revenue remained the same.

So, if you are thinking of jumping in to a reputable affiliate program, think in terms of an online business which requires work to get yourself on that beach, but there is a pie, currently larger than £3 billion which you can take a slice from!

Today we have launched our own free to join affiliate program, which begins by selling Internet Marketing training material but will extend to Internet marketing tools and services in the very near future. Plus, for a limited time only, we are paying new sign-ups of our affiliate program £10.00 for just signing up.

You can read more about our free affiliate marketing program on our affiliate partner site.

* The eConsultancy Affiliate Marketing Merchants Report 2007

It's a challenge isn't it? Selling online, it's a challenge!

Apart from the setup costs of your e-commerce website you have your management time and learning curve to consider. Also, contending with an ever increasing and competitive marketing cost keeps many online merchants up at night.

It can sometimes seam like a hike too far, but there is a lower cost and effort solution. You can spread the word by sharing a slice of your revenue when you sell something. Now, you may feel uncomfortable about such a solution, but don’t be.

If you think about your current marketing budget for 100% revenue, you're probably looking at quite a scary number. Wouldn't it be better to pay this same budget only when sales are made? Performance linked sales is the Holy Grail when it comes to direct salespeople. You only pay a commission when a sale is made, perfect! Affiliate marketing is the same principle. People and companies that run successful and high traffic websites, drive potential buyers to your store or service website and hey presto more sales and less non-profitable advertising and marketing.

The biggest names on the Internet are all running affiliate schemes, eBay^TM, Amazon^TM even Google^TM shares its wealth through its Pay-Per-Click scheme AdSense^TM. So it's not a question of if you should be doing it, it's a question of how you should do it!

There are 3 main ways to setup a successful affiliate scheme.

1. Employ an affiliate manager to find new affiliates and manage your campaigns. You just need to ensure that they are of good quality and can show you a track record of previous successes.
2. Join an affiliate programme or group, normally called a network. Again, ensure that it's a good quality community with a good success record. Take a look at Affiliate Window which is a well respected service provider. 
3. Do it yourself. This is a great solution and allows you to retain control of your campaigns and manage your affiliates yourself. However you will need to find and manage your affiliate partners yourself. A great solution here is Post Affiliate Pro, see below for more details.

In cases 1 and 2, affiliate managers and do it yourself, you're going to need a reliable tracking solution to help manage your affiliates, sale associations, commissions etc. I must say that as of yet, we haven't come across a better provider than Post Affiliate Pro and the best thing about it is that they offer a Free, yes Free, hosted solution, so that you can dip your toe in the water, before diving in.

So if your run an e-commerce website and you want to grow your sales without upfront marketing spend, take a look at Post Affiliate Pro, it's a great solution!

Do you run an affiliate network or are you an affiliate that is a member of a network? Send us a comment and we'll add you to this list!

At the forefront of a marketer’s mind is the exposure of one's products or services to an audience that is either interested already or is likely to be interested in them.

Ad Networks like Google™, Yahoo™ and MSN™ can facilitate both of these types of demographic. Those people that are on-line and have an interest already can be engaged through normal search marketing and those that are likely to have an interest can be touched through exposure on related websites.

Search marketing is where an advert is delivered to an Internet user actively searching for a particular product, service or topic. Many products are known by name or in some cases by a code or ID of some kind. This is specifically relevant with books ( ISBN codes), electrical equipment and branded goods such as iPod Nano™ and Ralph Lauren Polo Shirts. Services are a little less obvious but the principles remain the same, search terms used (called keywords) will relate to the service in question.

Ad Networks provide a service where adverts are positioned on related websites, in most cases there are 2 primary forms of this advertising.

The first relates again to keywords, when an Internet user visits a website within the Ad Network, which in this case is called a “Targeted Network” or “Context Advertising”, the web page is scanned by the Ad Network for related adverts. Hence, a website discussing “Health care for pets” may display adverts related to pet insurance, pet food and other pet products.

The second is related to vendor requests, this is when the advertiser is more targeted to particular websites and can cherry-pick the sites, and in some cases, pages and locations on page where they want their advert to be displayed. In these cases the cost of showing the adverts is a little higher and charges for click throughs' are almost always levied.

Within most of these networks, marketers can also refine their demographics further based on age, sex, location, days of the week, time of day and technology being used e.g. PC or Mac based browsers, Phones and PDA’s.

When planning an Ad Networks campaign, the first question is what kind of campaign is being run. Is the marketer looking for immediate sales or is it a lower impact branding exercise?

The next consideration, and this is important, when dealing with paid search marketing and context advertising, is Profit-Per-Click. Unlike the terms pay-per-click or cost-per-click, profit-per-click is when you work back wards from what a sale is worth and apply it to your click through and conversion rates.

If your on-line marketing consultant or SEM provider is not discussing your products or services profitability, they are not doing their jobs!

Profit-Per-Click is the best model to ensure that your spend will generate profitable results. It works as follows:

Say your product sells for £1,000 and has a gross profit of £400.00. Now, to start with, we need to apply an average of click through rates. This can be anything between 1% and 5%, less than 1 is simply not good enough and your advert or keywords are wrong or your competition is over paying. More than 5% is unlikely so keep it within this range.

Now we have to guess a typical conversion rate, that is paid visitors that end up buying our product. Again a good range at this stage is 0.5% to 3%. Conversions below 0.5% are likely with very high value products/services or where competition is showing much lower prices. Conversions above 3% certainly do happen, but again, this is the best starting range.

We now just need to create a matrix to show our profitable levels and therefore maximum costs per click.

This table shows that we would require 200 paid visitors at £2.00 per click to break even at 0.5% conversion, whereas we would just need 34 visitors at a whopping £11.76 per click if our conversion rate was 3%.

The lower click through cost don’t give us much room to make any money, where as the higher conversion rate gives us plenty of breathing space.

Your SEM Company or consultancy should be discussing conversions with you and keep you abreast of ways to optimise your campaign and website to create better and higher conversion rates.

They should be discussing demographics with you to try and refine advert placement and views.

Finally your supplier should be looking at both keywords and potential target sites. The keywords are important to understand the frequency they are used and the competition chasing those words and phrases. The target sites should be scrutinised from a number of new and returning visitors perspective and look for placement targeting rather than site wide adverts.

Find out more about keyword research, link partners and website associations with the Understanding Search Engines DVD.