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Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

In the beginning, affiliate programs had fairly sophisticated technology but relatively unsophisticated implementation; referrals were generally made through banner ad type links. The cost to implement these affiliate programs was a significant investment for a business. The attitude of merchants was the more affiliates the better.

Affiliate marketing is ideal for merchants in that fees are only paid on performance. Fees can be set as a fixed amount or as a percentage. Payment can be made on cost-per-click, cost-per-sale, cost-per-action, or cost-per-lead basis. Most often the referral fee is paid on the sale as a percentage of the sale; however, there are many cost-per-action campaigns in existence. A popular example of the cost-per-action is a set fee for each person the affiliate encourages to join a merchant’s e-club or e-specials permission-based marketing list.

Today things are very different in the affiliate marketing world. No longer  are the links provided through banner ad type buttons on the affiliate’s site. Today affiliate marketing can be done through signature files, e-mails, autoresponder replies, help files, software products, games, viral marketing, java applets, demos, ftp sites, active-x controls, Flash, e-zine articles, blogs, RSS feeds, and e-books.

The first advertisements on the World Wide Web began in 1994. These ads were always placed at the top of a Web page and were always 60 pixels high and 468 pixels wide and were known as banner ads. Whenever anyone thought about Internet marketing back in those early days, the first thing that came to mind was banner advertising. Back in those days, advertisers managed their own banner advertising campaigns and sites sold their own advertising space.

The second generation came along very quickly. Online advertising agencies started to crop up, managing the banner advertising space for very heavily trafficked sites. If you wanted to advertise on a specific site, you worked with their online agency. To advertise with a number of heavily trafficked sites, you ended up dealing with two or three or four advertising agencies.

Almost as soon as banner advertising became mainstream, it started to decline in effectiveness. Click-through rates dropped through the floor, technology to strip out unwanted ads became very popular, and soon there was all kinds of available advertising space at dirt prices and few takers. Banner advertising was okay for branding, but terrible on generating traffic to your site.