What is an Affiliate Program?

By: GetArticleBot

An affiliate program is a marketing program where you can receive commission for helping a parent company (such as HostGator) generate sales. The parent company provides you with all your advertising tools such as banner ads, links and tracking codes for you to place on your sites, in your emails or other internet listings. When a visitor to your site or listing clicks on an ad or link, the transaction is tracked. If this transaction results in a sale for the parent company, you get paid for that sale. It’s that simple!

Thousands of established businesses set up affiliate programs in order to have people like you promote their products or services. When you sign up for an affiliate program you are given a link with your own unique id embedded into it.

With your own unique link it then becomes your job to promote the affiliate program and drive traffic to the businesses website. You never handle sales or products, but each time an interested prospect visits the website through your link and actually purchases something you earn a commission.

One of the most effective ways to promote affiliate programs is to find a subject that you are passionate about. Something that (humility aside), you may even consider yourself an expert of. Take that subject and develop a website that is devoted to it.

Companies selling products or services online pay you a cut of their profits (a share in their revenue) as a commission on any and all sales you create for them (i.e. pay-per-sale), through the introduction of new customers.

Basically, what we are talking about here is the online version of a salesperson working on commission-only and not employed by the company who’s products or services they promote: An independent representative. One important difference however, is that you don’t actually have to “close the sale.” The company do that for you. Your job is simply to introduce qualified prospective customers.

Some companies only pay you a percentage of their net profit after all deductions. In other words they pay you a percentage of what they decide is their profit after subtracting what they say are their costs.

An affiliate program can be a very good method to promote your business online. It is a program in which your affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber or customer he or she provides you through his or her efforts. You must pay commissions but if you have a good margin on your products or services, you can afford to pay them. There are several different compensation models which are usually based on exposure, visits, sales…

An affiliate program is a marketing tactic relying on links between websites to drive traffic from one to another, in exchange for some benefit. In the case of Palo Alto Software’s affiliate program, your website refers visitors to our specific software products; in exchange, you receive a commission on sales from visitors you send us.

To sign up for our program, you must first read and agree to our operating agreement, and then fill out our application form. We will review your application and if accepted, you will receive an email notification with your login information. Once you have that email, you can log in and start creating links, get HTML code for our images, and using our other content and tools to start earning money selling our products.

There are many benefits of the Palo Alto Software Affiliate Program. First, we care about our affiliates. We’re thrilled that other people believe in our products enough to want to help sell them and recommend them to their site visitors. Second, we are fair to our affiliates; we provide personal service, and will do whatever we can to help you earn money in our program. Third, we have the #1 selling and top-rated business-plan software product available. It’s a recognizable brand name, we are very well established, and we care about our customers. This means that our product sells well on the Internet, which in turn means more commission for you.

Affiliate marketing is simply compensation for third party advertising. When you start an affiliate program, you pay a commission (percentage/flat rate) to the website that sent you the customer. You use affiliate tracking programs to track how many sales result from each affiliate/advertiser. You build a team of affiliates who happily promote your products and services for a commission, and you sit back and wait for customers. Easy.

If you are selling products or services on the Internet, and aren’t yet using an affiliate marketing strategy, you are doing business the hard way. Having affiliate programs in place entices advertisers to promote your products. Advertisers can simply add affiliate links and banners to their websites to recommend your services.

Amazon is probably the most well-known pioneer of affiliate marketing. Without an affiliate program they would have ended up just another web-mall. But with an affiliate program Amazon has grown into an online shopping giant.

Think of it like a referral program. Renderosity is always looking for new people to help grow our community. One way to do that is by placing banners/links on other websites, or “affiliates”. Our affiliates will have a link somewhere on their site that links back to Renderosity.com. Since the majority of our members are in touch with other digital artists, it makes sense to offer them a chance to become an affiliate for Renderosity.

We send you a Renderosity link that has a special tracking code in it. You put this link anywhere on your site. Whenever a new visitor reaches our site through your link, it’s counted by our tracking system.

Whatever you like! You have the option of doing a text link, or a banner advertisement that you can use anywhere on the web. You can add it to your website, blog, even your MySpace. You can also add it to forum signatures for other sites that you frequent. The possibilities are endless. For more tips on how to use your affiliate link, email JasonK, the Renderosity Marketing Guy!

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