If you have a compelling product or proposition to offer to the market then one of the key critical success factors is maximising distribution. Within the online environment, one of the least recognised but potentially most cost effective route to market is Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is essentially the process by which you market your products or services via the websites of a panel of third party affiliates. Affiliates are website publishers who receive traffic to their websites and who want to "monetise" that traffic by earning income through the promotion of other companies' products. Affiliates can include publishers of any type of website including association, community or affinity group websites that attract significant volumes of traffic from their target audience.

By way of example, the website www.ukcampsite.co.uk includes a register of UK camp sites and appears near the top of Google when you search on "find a campsite". Consequently, this website receives a significant volume of traffic from people who are interested in going camping. The website owners have chosen to "monetise" their site by publishing adverts and links to caravan related websites e.g. caravan insurance websites.

Affiliate Marketing technology enables tagged links to be created so that when an agreed action is successfully completed e.g. policy sold online, quote completed online, online form submitted etc a payment is made to the source affiliate.

Consequently, a key benefit of Affiliate Marketing is the ability to secure business from specifically targeted markets for an acquisition cost that has been agreed upfront.

If you were a caravan insurance provider then this could represent a very attractive marketing proposition.

There are essentially two forms of Affiliate Marketing:

• Affiliate Network Marketing - where you become a "merchant" on an established affiliate network that could control thousands of affiliates/publishers and utilise their existing technology to market yourself to the affiliates and track subsequent business and payments. Most networks charge an upfront fee and will take a percentage fee for any subsequent business secured.
• Private Affiliate Network - technology is also available to enable you to set up your own private affiliate network whereby you can supply existing/new affiliates/introducers with trackable banners and links. It can prove to be a labour intensive task to set up the technology and source suitable affiliates/introducers, however, once in place the benefits can be substantial.

How Can e-Business Marketing Help?

Affiliate Marketing consultancy and services that we can offer include:

• Consultancy on Affiliate Marketing opportunity
• Affiliate Network investigation, negotiation and set up
• Private Affiliate Network investigation, implementation and roll out
• Management and KPI reporting