You have learned how to recruit affiliates into your program and where to find them, but what is their value to you and how they can help grow your affiliate program? Below are 5 of the most common affiliates and a little bit about them:
1. Coupon Affiliates
They are the most common type of affiliate. They are not a fit for every program, but if you do allow them in your program they can drive qualified traffic to your site through coupons offered through the affiliate program.
In many cases the larger coupon affiliates rank highly for coupon-related terms in the organic search results.
Examples include: RetailMeNot, Savings.com, and GoodSearch.com.
2. Incentivized Traffic Affiliates
This type of affiliates shares a part of the commission (received from merchants/advertisers) with the end user.
The incentive may come in the form of cashback, points, virtual currency, or similar arrangements.
Examples include: Ebates, BigCrumbs.com, Mr. Rebates, and even Bank of America.
3. Content Affiliates
They are blog (or forum) owners that create unique content (their own or UGC) for their visitors. They send traffic to a merchant’s site through banner ads and/or text links embedded in content. They may not have the traffic of coupon affiliates, but they generally have a high conversion rate and provide incremental value to merchants.
4. PPC Affiliates
They are affiliates that run paid search campaigns using Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and other platforms and use affiliate links to monetize their efforts. This type of promotion is high risk for the affiliate, as they have to pay for the ads and there is no guarantee for a return on investment. They can work in conjunction with merchant’s current PPC efforts to ensure they are not bidding on the same sets of keywords, or not competing with the merchant by capping their bids.
5. Comparison Shopping Sites
They are price comparison websites and aggregators. These affiliates provide the end user with a tool to compare prices (or other product characteristics!) across an array of merchants, utilizing advertisers’ product feeds to power their engines (Shopping Comparison Engines, that is).
Examples of comparison shopping affiliates include: TheFind.com, Shopzilla.com, and many others.
Knowing the various types of affiliates will help in determining their potential value to the program and will help in growing your affiliate program. Recruiting the right affiliates will be a step toward success and bringing in the incremental sales volume you desire.