Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a route to market for your small business.  Put simply, you sell digitally through a partner. Affiliate marketing is a process where a small business attracts customers by rewarding some third parties, known as affiliates, for marketing their goods and services, and/or for driving traffic to their website. It feeds your digital marketing funnel by driving potential customers to your website or social media, or it markets and sells products on your behalf.

Affiliate example – Amazon.com

Develop your own affiliate program

A straightforward example from the corporate world, would be that of Amazon. If you have a website about hunting and fishing, and you attract and retain many visitors who associate themselves with these hobbies, you can become an Amazon affiliate.  Amazon is the merchant. You are the affiliate.

What would this entail?  You would need to go to Amazon’s website and sign as an affiliate.  Then you can search for the books and other products which are suitable for the hunting and fishing fraternity.  Having selected suitable products, and here is the clever part, you cut the relevant code from Amazon’s website and paste it into your own pages.  Then it will look as if you have a series of products to sell to your visitors, in the same colours and livery as your own pages.  However, once the customer decides to buy the products, he or she is rerouted to Amazon’s own website.  They take payment from the customer and supply the goods; you, as the affiliate, will receive a commission.  Other than that, you do not participate in any part of order fulfilment.  This is a simple affiliate process.