When it comes to affiliate marketing, it’s more a case of who you know, rather than just the mechanics of arranging a campaign.
Affiliates are the old sales agents of long ago – way before the ecommerce revolution – who would adopt a company’s products and sell them as their own in return for a slice of the sales price; anything from 15% to 20%.
Nowadays affiliates are paid in a number of ways, including CPC, CPL and CPA. CPC is Cost per Click the amount of money is costs to generate a user towards a given site. Cost per Lead is the reward provided for every user that, usually, fills out a response on the given website and therefore becomes a lead. Cost per Acquisition is the cost of the user actually buying something from the website.
You can see how it stacks up. But the important thing of course is the affiliate with whom the deal is done.
Affiliates come in all shapes and sizes, but the most successful ones are those that have invested in their own sites and spent money on PPC and SEO strategies and created valuable platforms that attract traffic that can be used elsewhere.
But it follows that the more powerful affiliate, the more effective he will be, and certain networks of affiliates are very choosy as to who they work with. The best will only provide products that are top sellers with high through put at good prices.
Thus, at this price, it’s more a question of who you know, than the actual theory behind affiliate marketing.