Craig Aramian is President of Aramian associates, a 20-year old award-
winning marketing agency. He is also the co-founder of the National Marketing, Technology and Training Center in Washington, DC.
Craig may be reached at 202-463-3677 or by e-mail
at craig@
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by Craig Aramian
President
Aramian associates
Just this week, Lycos launched its "Lycos Traffic Affiliate" program. Anyone with a non-objectionable web site can become part of the Lycos extended family. You can showcase a Lycos "Search" content box, a "Stock Quote" box, "Sports Scores" box, etc. Now, each time someone on your site decides to get a quote on their favorite stock, they just enter the symbol, click, and voila! - you just made .03.
Affiliate programs are designed to build site traffic by encouraging webmasters to send visitors from their sites to someone else's. To encourage them to do so, other webmasters pay them for the new traffic. Sometimes a few pennies, other times much more.
Most webmasters like affiliate programs. They are cost-efficient and measurable. (A unique HTML code can be embedded in affiliate links to track traffic and reward its source.) And out of nowhere, a check arrives every month. Can't beat that kind of business.
A number of businesses have emerged to organize the affiliate movement. The best known is LinkShare.com, which represents many of the larger merchants and serves as middle man to track traffic, monitor sites, pay commissions, etc. Others like Associateprograms.com provide information about affiliate opportunities with many smaller firms.
Affiliate program advocates claim that by adding links to other sites with merchandise relevant to your visitors, you're doing them a service. That's Internet 101 - hard to argue. If you sell marching band uniforms and your site provides a link to Amazon.com to purchase "The Ultimate Guide to Sport and Event Management", that's a good thing. Webmasters having been doing that since the beginning - now they're getting paid for it.
Detractors of the affiliate theory assert that webmasters will be driven primarily by greed. That they'll provide links to products and services which reward them with the highest commissions, regardless of quality or relevancy. Other detractors question why you'd want to encourage anyone to ever leave your site and still more believe that cluttering their sites with promotions turns visitors off.
What should you do? It comes down to why you have a web site and what you want visitors to do when they get there. If you treat your site as an independent profit center, you better have something generating revenue. Unless you're selling products or services already, you need to go the affiliate route. Affiliate programs have overtaken banners and you don't have to sell the space. You select those with whom you affiliate. Choose links that are relevant to your visitors - presumably you do that anyway. Affiliating with Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com or any of the major booksellers is a no-brainer. You'll find some good books and tapes to recommend. And these merchants pay well, sometimes up to 15% of the sale.
If you're already selling on your site, should you showcase affiliates? That's a tougher call. You have to consider the real possibility that you'll be sending potential customers to someone else's store before they ever make it to your cash register. One way to get around this is to hold your affiliate promotion until someone gets to your order confirmation page. Once you've sold them and processed the transaction, there's no harm in directing them to someone who'll pay you for the traffic - they're leaving anyway.
What if your site is simply a promotion for your business? If you're a very small business, you can make yourself look a little bigger with a recognizable logo on your site - Amazon.com, Lycos, etc. Put the recognized logo on your home page near yours but make visitors go deeper into the site to get book recommendations or stock quotes.
One of the fears about affiliate programs is that webmasters will promote only high-commissioned products and services. That's a legitimate concern and it's clearly happening. Should you do this? If you don't care to see your visitors again after sending them to a rip-off site, it's probably good business. However, if you would like these folks to do business directly with you sometime in this or the next millenium, you'd better treat them right.
Affiliate programs are good business. Affiliate programs should be part of your web marketing plan. And you can just as easily become the Merchant as the Affiliate. If it's worth it to you to pay for the traffic, look into it. You've heard the salesperson's riddle - "Why does the business owner pay such high commissions? -- Because he can afford to." Maybe you can afford to as well.
P.S. Our new Web Marketing Plan guide comes out next month. Learn to craft a web marketing strategy to achieve your goals. To reserve your free copy, visit www.aramians.com and complete the Request Form now.
Copyright © 1999 Craig Aramian
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