Affiliate Marketing is an incredibly inexpensive and effective way to grow a business, and (depending on the type) has an incredibly low-risk factor for business.

In a nutshell, Affiliate Marketing is a way of promoting on-line and web business through affiliates (or publishers.) The affiliate is rewarded for every customer, visitor, subscriber, or sale that is the result of their efforts and advertising. It’s a way of empowering other websites to market your business through their own channels (internet, e-mail etc.)

Affiliate Marketing is often confused with Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM), so some companies prefer to use the term ‘performance marketing’ to limit this confusion. MLM and Affiliate Marketing are simply not the same thing, as MLM is based on an entirely different system. Affiliate Marketing is basically a form of advertising and commission, but the affiliate does not move or sell the product. They merely advertise and are rewarded according to their efforts based on the merchant’s parameters. While there are many multi-tier programs of Network Marketing that use Affiliate Marketing in their program, these are strictly not considered as Affiliate Marketing.

So, what are these types and their differences?

Simply put, in the early days of the internet, Cost-Per-Click (CPC) was the general program used. This is when the affiliate only needs to display banners on their website, or send out emails, advertising the product or merchant. Every time a click on a banner or link in the email happens, a redirect to the merchant’s website happens. The merchant then pays the affiliate a certain amount of money for every ‘click.’

Google’s AdSense program is an example of this kind of Affiliate Marketing, however it’s not entirely the same, as AdSense is more contextual advertising (only displays adverts that relate to the website they are displayed.)

Because CPC could so easily be manipulated, spam sites and emails became prevalent amongst many unethical affiliates, as well as click fraud and other issues. This has resulted in only 1% of the on-line market using CPC these days.

The other types of Affiliate Marketing are CPS (Cost-Per-Sale) and CPA (Cost-Per-Action.) Basically, the affiliate is only rewarded with a commission when the advert they have generated ends in a sale (CPS), or a subscription or lead (CPA.) This can be very rewarding for the affiliate, especially if the customer buys a fairly expensive product, or high quantities. 80% of the market currently uses the CPS system, whereas 19% use the CPA system.

The wonderful thing for merchants on CPS and CPA is that they actually take no risk. The risk now lies with the advertiser or affiliate. And, since this form of marketing is usually just in the form of displaying adverts on the affiliate’s website, there is very little (if at all) risk involved.

Because of the success of early companies like Amazon.com and CDNOW using Affiliate Marketing, proving its high efficiency, it has now become an integrated part of business plans – not just for e-commerce - but for all types of business.

Bruno Auger

Tags:   e-commerce, Cost Per Click, Affiliate Marketing, Adsense, Cost per Sale, MLM, Cost Per Action

A college student claimed it was all a joke when he put his vote in this fall's presidential election up for sale on the Web auction site eBay. But prosecutors didn't see the humor.

A college student claimed it was all a joke when he put his vote in this fall's presidential election up for sale on the Web auction site eBay. But prosecutors didn't see the humor.

Customer care is essential for business growth

Hosting customer support has evolved to more than just providing the technical aspects of server maintenance.  Customer support is an essential part of any business, whether you are a small hosting company or a giant as Wal-Mart.  Customers will judge businesses on the degree of customer care and extended knowledge they have.

An example, I worked a support desk for a hosting company awhile back. People neglected to send their user name with the support ticket. This means, I now have to email them and ask for their user name before I can proceed.

This is a waste of both of our time. Instead of having a solution, the customer now needs to send the details of the problem, causing yet another delay. And, it increases the number of emails we need to wait for.

Another one is a customer sending a request for support that says only, "It doesn’t work".

If you send me an email saying "It doesn’t work", I have two options:

2. Ask you to describe the problem. Did you get an error? What did you encounter and what happened? Again, this causes a delay as I need to email the person back and ask this question.

1. List every possible problem that’s ever been encountered, as well as many hypothetical ones, which is time consuming and likely a total waste of my time and yours. I could be spending this time with other customers.

Another common problem is the customers that take a very long time to respond.

I’ve had people send me emails asking for help, replied within an hour or 2, then I’ve LITERALLY have to wait 6 to 12 days for them to respond.

Then, we started the whole process over…I respond relatively fast, only to wait another week or more again. Simple problems like this can be rectified fairly fast only if the customer cooperates.

It’s very hard to provide the necessary support when the customers don’t respond quickly.

One more: If a support suggestion fixes the problem, please reply that it works. One reason is just the curiosity of the support staff, I like the satisfaction that we solved the problem, but another is that I want to know if I should offer others the same bit of advice.

Bad support isn’t always the fault of the seller. Customers can also greatly help their own cause if they’d just spend an extra 60 seconds and include the basic and obvious info the first time them make contact.

Tags:

Tags: customer service, customer care, Wal-Mart, hosting customer care, Bad support

 

Gene Line: over 60 000 000 search returns on Google

It's incredible to see how Google search returns change these days. On Gene Line we usualy saw something like 13 -16 Million returns, today we are talking about 62,900,000 returns.

YORGOOpublishing using Semiomantics still sits at rank 3 and 4! However, I am wondering what the Google guys are doing. Gene Line is a name of a person, a friend or ours, but there are also terms mixed in which have to do with genetic stuff. Google have no idea about semantics and they have a hard time to properly distinguish between Gene (genetic genes) and Gene the first name of our Line :-).

Gene Line is suffering from Googles incompetence in classifying terms and so are many others. Google is very popular as we all know, but that does not mean that they are any good or competent or giving any smart search returns. For as long as I have been analyzing Google, I have just noticed a leveling down of knowledge, a simplification of things or a low quality compilation of knowledge when it comes to search returns…and it's getting worse every day.

Sure it's a great service, showing off and helping people who want to know nothing about everything. And sure it's the way the world turns and the way most people seem to find satisfaction. But objectively Google does a lousy job, returns crap most of the time, and worst of all, their popularity influences global knowledge and culture for the worst.

No, I am not a Google freak and I am not in phase with this atitude where people should be taken for idiots and treated such like.

On the other hands…I LOVE IT! Because, the incredible incompetent way of Google to classify sites and to classify and list key-word based themes and topics gives us a huge opportunity: the opportunity to do better than average. The opportunity to rank high on Google by applying Semiomantics. Semiomantics has been developed to challenge Google's Algorithm and to place the real thing where it belongs…on top of Google.

On the other hand, it becomes the longer the more difficult to get visibility as Google mixes up increasingly junk with quality. Gene Line is a great example: Our friend is in the Auto Parts business and we want to associate his name to Auto Parts.

It's like in real life: you learn a profession, you want to build authority, therefore you have to associate your name to the topic of your professional choice to become known as an expert.

Gene Line is an Expert in Auto Parts and all that's aroung auto parts. Gene Line is using his name and his name is  cyber-polluted by Google's incompetence to separate a name from other junk.

At Semiomantics we are not trying to bend to Google's limitations nor to give in to the leveling down of global knowledge. Semiomantics is about publishing, about being categorized and listed properly in the intellectual desert called Google.

Google has created a new economic environment tempting to extort money from people for advertising in a junk environment and they got rich from that. How about creating something for people to make money from Google?

That's Semiomantics.

Yorgo
Semiomantics

PS: I wanted to talk about Gene Line's great book, but Google does not seem to care … so let's shoot at Google first :-)).

Greek Coffee Time

---

Copyright © 2008 YORGOO's Make Money with Home Business - Digest. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator or an affiliated website, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@yorgoopublishing.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana