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© 2011 Marketing Consultant - Adelard Gasana
“Affiliates are an extension of your brand, ensure that your brand carries the same good name it started with.”
Affiliate marketing is one of the biggest advantages a business can when being online. A properly run affiliate program allows you to lower your costs, create a fixed marketing costs, control your marketing message on a vast scale, mass promote through your affiliate network, get your message in front of a bigger audience, and be on the forefront of creativity and innovation.
In an affiliate marketing campaign you pay your affiliates for sales that were generated through their marketing efforts of your products/services. For this article I will use the example of a business selling apples.
Control Costs
Example: You are selling apples online for $1.00 an apple, and you create an affiliate program of offering 20% of sales. For every apple the affiliate sells for you, they are entitled to 20% of sales, or $0.20. The more apples they sell, the more money they make and you make. This is money you otherwise would not have had. They will work hard with the marketing material you provide them and with their own tools, skills, and knowledge to promote your apples.
Create Fixed Marketing Cost
Since you are only paying the affiliate 20%, your marketing costs are fixed at 20% for that specific traffic. This will allow you to scale your sales upward by simply promoting your affiliate program and the benefits to website owners that want to make some extra money by linking to your website that sells apples.
Mass Promotions Through Networks
Since your apples brand’s online presence is growing and becoming more popular you can start selling specialized green apples, and relay this new product to all of your affiliates. Your relationship with your affiliates becomes stronger since you allow them to promote another great product for you, and open the opportunity for them to make more money.
Control Marketing Message on A Vast Scale
You apple brand’s identity is very important, so as part of your affiliate program your affiliate agree to not misrepresent your apples as another type of apple, or fruit. Since all of the apples customers are tracked through the affiliate program you are able to tell whether some customers have been told by the affiliates that they were really buying oranges. You can now easily get rid of the “bad apple” affiliates (Pun intended), and deal with the good affiliates that don’t hurt your brand.
Bigger Audience Reach
Since your network is made up of other website owners your brand is on website that normally would not have been, and now you are making money you would not have been making without the exposure of the website owners/affiliates. The bigger your affiliate network is the more people that see and hear of your special brand of apples.
Creative Innovations And Test Ideas
Some affiliate might decide to create recipe websites using your brand apples as the secret ingredient. Some affiliates might open up candy apple stores using your apples exclusively. Others might do sponsor contests using your apples as the center piece like bobbing for apples or apple pie baking contests. Since your affiliate network is huge and has several affiliates working individually trying to promote your product uniquely, different and creative ideas are created.
One idea might work so greatly that you start using that for your own non-affiliate marketing, which further reduces your costs. Affiliate networks allow your brand a huge test ground for new promotion ideas with exciting and outside the box thinkers.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing has huge potentials for any business. Most big retailers, and online brands have some sort of affiliate program since it allows them to reduce costs, and expand their market reach without increasing their spending until there is a sale made. The real beauty is that you only pay for the marketing for apples you sell. So if no apples are sold you don’t pay your affiliate anything. To learn more about how affiliate marketing can help your online business grow contact Karma Snack today.
The last couple of days have been very exciting. I’m in the final stages of the Costa Rica Movie project, but more importantly I’m in the mist of building up a great online marketing company.
We’ve hired an All Star Business Development Director, A VP of Latin America, and have 3 addition sales guys. We’ve grown from 3, to a powerful team of 10 people relatively quickly.
I think the biggest advantage that we have is our knowledge of not online Internet marketing, but marketing metrics, population consensus, and business know how.
We have an awesome Data Analysts who used to work with American Express, Ingram Micro, and Humana to name a few companies. He’s able to crunch the numbers and give us the break down detail of if taking on this project makes sense.
Starting in May, thanks to our VP of Latin America, we’re opening up an office in Bolivia!!! We’ll be going down there soon to take a look at everything, and make sure everything runs smoothly. That’s freaking exciting, though.
Our Business Development Director has already begun opening up huge doors for us. If all goes well we are potentially going to be working on several digital media project for Dunkin Donuts, Red Lobster, Subway, Burger King, and PG. Had a great meeting on Tuesday at the Biltmore Hotel about that offer. Later on in the day, we had a conference call with P. Diddy’s Marketing team, so potentially we are close to closing that deal.
Later that day, my business partner and me went to Lucky Strikes to finish off the day, and talk about the future of the company. Most delicious Burger I’ve had in a long time. I’ll never forget the hostess though, a hot chick with a hotter yellow dress on, she was smoking. I’ll definitely be going back there again…
Thinks are looking really great. It’s weird, when you go after your dreams and goals, if you have enough skills and determination, nothing can stop you.
In the next couple of weeks, it’s crunch time, we gotta close out this month’s deals, finish up all the sales materials, and get the Bolivia office up and running, and then on top of that, I gotta get all these projects done. Looks like I’m going to be up at night for the next several weeks.
There are times and days where we just cannot handle everything that is on our plate. Without going into too much detail this week I have to create a sales manual for my sales team, finish up a movie website project, launch a new SEO tool called “Avalanche”, Get started with design for a new client, finish up 2 other client’s websites, help out a friend’s blog site, try to get a 4 year old side project off the ground, work on another website’s for my other company, send out invoices for overdue past projects, Create like 3 company docs for the sales process, and not go insane with the 30+ phone calls on my 2 cell phones and get more involved with 2 of my side companies due to a partner’s health issue; oh and by the way it’s already Friday!!!
I guess it helps to write down everything, so you can put it all into perspective.
I have to delegate which projects are the most time-sensitive and important ones. Which ones are the ones that are going to get my clients and me faster results? Which ones need immediate attention, and which ones can fall by the way side.
The biggest problem with time management is distractions. They ALWAYS happen. Here are some of the things I do to “ATTEMPT” to lessen the distractions. I use it in quotes, because things always never go as planned.
1st. Learn to say NO. I know when people ask for you for favors, or help on something you want to say yes, you want to help out, but be realistic with your time.
2nd. Always leave time for you. If you are constantly going full-speed for weeks and months at a time without taking a break for a day or two, then you will burn out quickly. I learnt this the hard way.
3rd. Pace yourself, don’t take on too much workload, split your time wisely. This again will fall into rule #1 learn to say NO.
4th. Schedule yourself accordingly; don’t let others schedule your time to benefit them. That means being the boss of your time, tell others when you can meet up, if that time is good, and if it is not, too bad, your busy.
5th. Don’t always immediately answer all your phone calls. If you are right in the middle of something, let it ring, or better yet turn it completely off. Then when you are free, listen to the voicemail and return the call, IF it is important. With 30+ phone calls on 2 cellphones, it is impossible for me to return everyone’s phone calls. I have to delegate what calls to make and what not do. If they don’t bother leaving a voicemail, then obviously it wasn’t important.
6th. Always have everyone be aware of the best form of communication; I choose email. If you have something for me, send it to my email, that way I am able to response on my Smartphones and can check to see whether it is important or not. If it is not important enough write it down and email it, it’s not important.
By setting and sticking to these ground rules you let people know that your time is very valuable, and contact you when there are important or emergencies that need to be taken care of.
Getting the actual work done is another process on it’s own. A couple things I should’ve done with a lot of these projects that I have.
1. Set realistic time expectations. That goes without saying.
2. Let your people know in advanced what your schedule is like, and what you are going to be doing. This gives them a constant idea of what to expect as a response from you when attempting to get in contact.
3. Don’t bit more that you can chew. This goes back to learning to say No. The amount of time you free up when you say NO is enormous. Most time allows you to have more free time, and create better quality of work.
4. Also, don’t check your email, every 5 minutes, that’s seriously distracting when you are in the middle of a big project.
That’s all I can think of for today, I gotta get some work done.
