Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a WIN-WIN situation for both the affiliate and the merchant. Because of its flexible nature, there are numerous benefits that you as the merchant will get by making use of this type of marketing strategy:

1. Low Upfront Costs – Starting your own affiliate program does not require you to have a large marketing budget upfront. Most types of promotional marketing such as billboards, email ads, or even pay-per-click advertising require you to have a certain amount allocated beforehand in order to get started. With affiliate marketing, all you need is your website and the software to run your affiliate program, such as JAM.
2. No Sales Associates Needed – With affiliate marketing, there is no need to have dedicated sales people on your staff. That’s because the affiliates in your program are your sales associates! These affiliates collectively help to promote your products and/or services for you, without having to have an upfront salary.
3. Pay-for-Performance – This is pretty much the best thing about affiliate marketing. You only pay when you get a sale or lead. No need to pay for underachieving employees. Affiliate marketing helps to reduce your overall marketing costs because you only pay for quality performance.
4. Free Website Traffic - Your affiliates will use their links as well as any marketing tools such as banners, text links, or text ads to promote your website and services. This results in free inbound traffic on your site.
5. Better Search Engine Rankings - Many search engines gauge their keyword rankings based on inbound links to your website. With affiliate marketing, your affiliates will have already placed their affiliate links on their web pages that point into your site, ultimately making your site more popular on the search engines.
6. Flexibility – Affiliate marketing allows you to be very flexible in how you pay your affiliates. You can pay them for certain actions undertaken, such as when they refer a customer that buys from you, or fills out a lead form, or downloads one of your products. It can be used however you want so as to generate the most revenue for your business.
7. Automation – Because affiliate marketing is normally setup via computers and the Internet, many of your affiliate management tasks can be quickly automated, helping to free up time for you to focus on other aspects of your business. Tasks such as commission management, affiliate tracking and reporting, are all automated when you use JAM as your affiliate marketing software.

Why You Should Start Your Own Affiliate Program

If you own or want to start your own Internet Business, affiliate marketing is a must for your marketing strategy. It is an easy, cost-effective solution to promoting your products and services effectively online. Additionally, you end up building a sense of community among your affiliate members when you utilize it correctly.
Think of it this way: Having a good number of affiliates promoting your products all over the Internet is similar to having thousands of sales agents going door to door selling your products all over the country. The great thing about having an affiliate program is you don’t have to put any of your affiliates on salary to get started!