"If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business." (B. C. Forbes)
A lot of people are
doing this mistake, they let themselves be driven out of business. How? By
starting a business and just hope that it will work. It’s the same with the
owners of e-commerce websites.
Why do I say this?
Because most of them they are just presenting their products but they are not selling
them. As usual, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, the solutions is in
front of you.
The easiest way to
increase your sites visibility and to “drive” visitors to your business is by
advertising.
Traditional online advertising
like CPC or CPM offers you the advantage of increasing your traffic, but not in
the best way. You will pay for clicks and for impressions but who knows what
you will receive. You just know for sure that you will pay.
The other way, is to
use your own affiliate program. You will pay, but you will pay only for sales,
not for impressions or clicks. In other words, pay less and receive more.
Why do you think big
players like amazon.com have their own affiliate programs? Because they know
how to drive their business. More affiliates, more sales, better business.
The alternative? SEO, advertising,
and luck. Advertising can be expensive as we’ve discussed. Let’s think a little
about SEO. It’s good to be SEO optimized, but I don’t think you would like to
put all your chances on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Everyone knows that having a
single source of visitors is risky, and you can
have a surprise in one morning when you wake up and they’ve changed their
algorithm. If you are driving your business based on luck, you don’t have a
business.
Let’s talk a little
about affiliate’s advantages.
From my experience as
a publisher and affiliate, I can say that I prefer to use affiliate programs
instead of advertising. I think the biggest problem in using advertising is
that there is a store owner, and there is publisher as a third player. This
third player is usually the one who delivers the advertisement, e.g. Google
Adsense, AdBrite, Clicksor and others. From my point of view as a publisher, I
don’t like this because I don’t know exactly how much money the store owner is
paying for advertisement and how much money I receive and how much money the
third party receives. From my point of view as affiliate, I like this because
I receive a fixed percent from the sales, so I know how much money I’ve
generated for the store owner and I know I was paid correctly.
It’s in your power to
convince the owners of other websites about the advantages of becoming your
affiliate and to drive your business.
Ionut Lupu
Virtue Affiliate, www.avaffiliate.com