Posted in Affiliate Marketing by Click Consult on 25th of September, 2008

Im serious: every company in the world should be doing affiliate marketing! The number one goal of advertising is to generate sales and, for so many forms of offline and online marketing, it is very difficult to track returns from your advertising expenditure. Sometimes it is even impossible. A company could pour millions of pounds into a television commercial that shows when thousands of people arent in the room – they could be chatting on the phone, making a cup of tea or even on the toilet! And yet with affiliate marketing not only can everything be tracked, but you only ever pay when you make a sale. In this sense, not only is it a risk-free form of advertising, but it is also a way of generating returning customers who could make multiple purchases throughout their lifetime. Lets face it, one of the biggest struggles for any business is getting people to make that initial purchase, but, once this is done, it is not out of the realms of possibility that they will happily make future purchases from your website (assuming everything went smoothly and they are happy with the product). Therefore, affiliate marketing isnt all about the number of sales you get each month – you also need to bear in mind that affiliate customers may remember your site in the weeks, months and years to come and return to generate you more business. So many forms of advertising and marketing spend a lot of money before they get the consumer to the ending of the buying process. With affiliate marketing all the preceding stages of the process are free of charge – and the value of leapfrogging all this way for free can often be more than what they had in their basket or shopping cart at the time.