Affiliates
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Selling on the Internet is a numbers game, the more visitors you get to your Web shop the more orders you will receive. But what if you could get other people to send new unique visitors to your Web shop as well?
Affiliates
Affiliates are individuals, companies and other businesses that exist purely to promote products for other Web shops. Affiliates typically have their own web sites (often dozens of them) and list products from merchants Web shops in the hope that if a visitor clicks on the products they promote, they will earn a commission of any sale that visitor to the merchants Web shop makes.
In some markets like the fashion industry, some leading online retailers rely on visitors from affiliate web sites for a significant percentage of their overall revenue.
Paying Affiliates
But of course affiliates are not looking to send visitors to your Web shop out of kindness! Affiliates operate their web sites in the hope of making a good level of income themselves through commission payments from the merchants.
If you have the facility in your Web shop you can set up your own affiliates program for potential affiliates to sign up and start earning a commission for sending visitors to your shop. If you do not have that sort of facility, you can use one of many affiliates schemes available on the Internet.
The Best Affiliates
All 3rd party affiliates schemes or programs come at a cost, with the most popular schemes having the biggest number of registered affiliates waiting to promote your products, but can cost as much as several hundred pounds a month to use their service.
There are cheaper schemes available, and the best we have come across so far include Affiliate Window and Affiliate Future.
With these types of affiliates schemes you sign up as a merchant, pay a monthly fee and set affiliate programs which include how much commission you are willing to pay per successful lead and perhaps some banners, text and product images your affiliates can use on their web sites to promote your Web shop.
Once registered as a merchant, all of the registered affiliates will be notified about your affiliates program and they can then decide to promote your Web shop.
Once a member of an affiliates scheme you can approach leading shopping portals such as Shop Safe and request that they add a link to your Web shop using the affiliates link you get from the scheme you are signed up to.
If you can afford the initial expense and ongoing monthly fee, affiliates are an excellent way to increase visitor numbers to your Web shop. Some affiliates web sites feature highly on the leading Search Engines and perhaps can attract visitors that your own Web shop cannot reach on its own.
With Internet Retailer's easy to use Web shops you can now become an affiliate yourself and choose to include affiliate products and links within your Web shop at no extra cost.