Increasing Traffic To Your Online Store

One of the best ways of increasing traffic to your online store is to allow thousands of webmasters to put your link, banners, coupons and product data feeds on their web site for FREE.

You don't pay these webmasters anything until somebody actually buys something from your Online Store. This is called affiliate marketing, or performance based marketing.

Performance based marketing allows your Online store to be advertised all over the World Wide Web for Free while branding your domain name or trade name. Only when somebody buys, that's when you pay!

Compare this to PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing where you pay for each click if you make a sale or not. Compare this to signing up for a $5000 banner advertising campaign where you must really know your stuff in the area of testing and tracking.

Performance Based Marketing is one of the best risk-free ways of increasing traffic to your online store because your affiliates are the ones who do all the promotion. There are two considerations for Online merchants when thinking about setting up an Affiliate Marketing system.

• Setting up and managing the affiliate tracking and payment system.
• Recruiting an army of affiliates.

It's all well and good to say that affiliate marketing will increase traffic to your Online store, however, the system needs to be setup and running bug-free before any of this can happen. Many Online stores fail each year because they have not set up this system properly in a way that works for their specific store.

Two Ways To Get Started

Option One - Find a suitable affiliate tracking software, install, run and manage it all yourself including making payments to affiliates, and managing a help and support system for your affiliates.

Option Two - Outsource the entire process with a performance based affiliate marketing company.

Pay For Performance Options

Performance based marketing involves giving a payment when the desired action is completed. Two of the most popular actions that top Online merchants pay for are:

Pay-Per-Sale - A Pay-Per-Sale transaction is complete when the traffic makes a purchase. The merchant decides in advance how much commission gets payed to the affiliate.

Pay-Per-Lead - A Pay-Per-Lead transaction is complete when the traffic completes an Online form with personal data like name, email etc. The merchant decides in advance how much they will pay for each lead.

In both cases, the traffic is tracked, and all sales and leads get automatically credited to the affiliates accounts.

Conclusion

Do your research and weigh up all the options in order to discover what your particular business needs. For example, if your business resources are stretched already, you will need to either hire extra personel to run your affiliate management system or you might like to outsource instead.

Either way, using Performance Based Affiliate Marketing is an excellent way of increasing traffic to your Online store.