How to Market a Business Through Affiliate Marketing

If you have a website for your business that you want to promote, marketing your business through affiliate marketing makes a lot of sense. Affiliate marketing is a method of advertising your business online where you reward website publishers for bringing customers to your business

First of all, decide which type of affiliate marketing technique you are going to use. You can most commonly pay publishers based on visitors, leads or sales. Paying per visitor simply means you reward a publish for directing someone to your site. Paying per lead means that you pay per sale lead. A lead can be an email address, contact information or anything else that gives you a gateway to a potential customer. If you just want to give publishers a commission on sales that they had a hand in, you can decide to use the pay per sale model.

Secondly, select an affiliate network company to use. By using an affiliate network company, the entire process of finding publishers and tracking their activity is made extremely simple. See the Resources section for two of the best affiliate networks.

Third, create an advertiser account with the affiliate network that you have chosen. Specify if you want to pay per visitor, pay per lead or pay per sale. Also make sure that you set a reasonable monthly budget that you can afford. Once you are all setup at one affiliate network, you can setup accounts with other affiliate networks if you choose.

Last but not the least, track your successes and failures through the tracking programs of your affiliate networks. As you setup your accounts and start getting activity, it's vital that you keep an eye on what is and isn't working. Figure out the areas where affiliate marketing are most successful for you, and stick to those areas.