Business-to-Business Affiliate Programs by Fabio Sequeira
Affiliate programs were first developed for the business-to-consumer
market, but they have grown dramatically in the b-to-b space. In fact,
the affiliate program model can easily be adapted to meet the needs of
the b-to-b marketer. Suppose you are a marketer of financial services
and you target business prospects. If you were part of the Amazon.com
Associates program or another Internet bookseller's program, you could
select appropriate books in the financial category and sell them on your Web site. You are providing your site visitors with a service and gaining additional revenue at no cost. It really is that easy to make money with the affiliate program model.
The same principle applies to other affiliate programs, from products to services to auctions. It is all in how you use the affiliate program to meet your own specialized business-to-business marketing needs.
I have taken this approach with my own company. Through the
Amazon.com Associates program, I added a direct marketing bookstore
to my company's Web site. It is completely flexible and uncomplicated.
We choose marketing books (including my own) that are relevant to
our site and write our own descriptions of the books. Each book has a
special order number, which links directly to the Amazon.com site, so
visitors to our site can order these books through Amazon.com. We
also have a search box link, which makes it possible for visitors to buy anything Amazon.com sells through our site.
For each item ordered through our site from Amazon.com, our
company gets a small commission. We are providing a valuable service to our Web site visitors and enjoying the benefits of e-commerce at no cost to the company. The income is modest, but the service we provide is invaluable. As an Amazon.com Associate, I can check on the
hits and purchase activity generated through my bookstore via Amazon's
Associates' Web page, plus we get a check every quarter. This is but one tiny example of how an affiliate program can work in a business-to-business setting.
Second only to Amazon.com in terms of e-commerce leadership is
Dell Computer. Dell announced its first affiliate marketing program in
March 1999. With 50 charter members, the Dell program relies on
LinkShare (www.linkshare.com), the owner of the largest affiliate net-
work, to bring its products to more than 65,000 affiliate sites. LinkShare technology tracks and monitors all Dell sales through affiliates. Later that year, the program was expanded to include Dell's Asia Pacific business as well.
Despite the growth of affiliate marketing, some believe the model is
flawed. Critics say that affiliate marketing simply directs Web traffic to other sites, providing a quick exit door instead of keeping visitors captive. As a result, some companies, such as Iconomy (www.iconomy.com) and Escalate (www.escalate.com), offer to build ready-made Web stores that sit on a company's Web site rather than sending visitors to another site to make a purchase.
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About the Author
I am an internet marketer on fulltime. I write articles and ebooks about make money online opportunities.
