Recently I’ve been researching revenue sharing, specifically affiliate marketing- a concept where a business rewards its partners (affiliates) with money depending on clicks, leads, or sales generated.  Many average Internet users see affiliate marketing as a way to make easy money.

A blogger or Web site owner simply has to partner up with a business, create a landing page or set up banner ads, add in the right key words to attract interested users, and wait for the cash to roll in.  This new profit model has dawned a new group of “average Joe” marketers, making a profit for themselves along with prospects for businesses.

Businesses create their own models of affiliate programs to best suit their objectives for the marketing scheme:

Barnes and Noble (B&N) offers a 6% sales commission on a variety of products that affiliate marketers may choose to advertise on their sites.  Affiliates simply follow the steps to apply banner ads to their page, receive their monthly commission in increments of $100 from Google Adsense.  B&N targets the authors of books as a way to promote their pieces through their Web sites and generate company revenue.

Tea Forte offers affiliates a 10% commission on all sales, providing banner ads, product choices, and links to include in their Web sites.  Their program is more neutral than B&N or Third Tribe (which I discuss below) in their use of LinkShare, a provider of online marketing solutions that creates and manages an affiliate program to meet the needs of the company.

The Third Tribe offers 33% commission per month for each (active) referral membership.  Third Tribe uses affiliate marketing as a way for members to reduce their own monthly membership fee and earn additional income; in order to successfully gain a profit, affiliates would need at least four new or recurring referred members each month.

The varying models of business to consumer affiliate marketing stir a number of questions:

How does affiliate marketing generate new sales (in addition to passive income), rather than redirecting interested customers through different channels to purchase?

Can an affiliate marketer make a full living off of these models?

How does affiliate marketing fit into a business’s sales pipeline?

Questions or thoughts? Let me know what you think.

Tina Walsh
Marketing Coordinator
RedZebraWorks

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Tags: eMarketing, generating sales, leads, marketing, promoting, RedZebraWorks