Affiliate marketing is a great way to increase your online (or offline) revenues. There are two ways to integrate affiliate marketing into your business. The first is by attracting affiliate marketers to promote your products and services (affiliate publisher) and the second is by offering complementary products and services of other companies from your website to increase sales (affiliate marketer / advertiser.)

Advantages of Becoming an Affiliate Publisher
Becoming an affiliate publisher is akin to having a commission based sales force working for you.  Affiliate marketers are only paid by sending your company referrals, leads, or sales (you choose). 

Getting Started as an Affiliate Publisher
Ideally, you would get started by working through an affiliate network, which is an organization that helps promote your program to established affiliate marketers. The advantage for you is that these networks are trusted by professional affiliate marketers, whereas an affiliate might be reluctant to work directly with a company they do not know.

Depending on how many affiliate marketers you attract, you may need to create a full time position for an affiliate manager, who would be the point of contact for the affiliates and also be responsible for creating resources for the affiliates such as banners ads, ad copy, HTML code, and the like.  Additionally, the affiliate manager will maintain affiliate relationships, reward high producing affiliates, and keep terms and conditions up to date.

Advantages of Becoming an Affiliate Marketer / Advertiser
If your goal is to simply increase revenues from your website, you can register with affiliate networks as an affiliate marketer to promote complementary products and services and get paid by those affiliate publishers.  The key to success in this arena is having enough web traffic or a larger enough database to put these affiliate offers in front of.  If you do not yet have solid web traffic or a large customer database, you would be best served by staying focused on building your core business.

To learn more about how we can help you integrate affiliate marketing into your business model, contact us at 602-903-6223 of info(@)akaim.com.