Business Marketing Online: strategies and techniques

Business Marketing Online : Strategies and Techniques

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing in e-commerce can be defined as a commission payment a website or an e-commerce portal pays to another website for bringing traffic . One of the earliest successful affiliate marketing campaigns was rolled out by Amazon . Many partly credit Amazon 's success and brand recall to its affiliate marketing campaign where it rewarded websites for hosting Amazon links . Amazon paid commissions to third party website in instances potential customers clicked on Amazon link from these websites . What it did for Amazon was

to rapidly build brand recognition and generate traffic volumes that an independent and stand alone website could not manage to do in a short period of time . For what was crucial to Amazon was the number of people who visited the website

This helped spread the word about books being available to purchase on the website . Amazon had a new business model and hence not all people would be the leaders and go for a new medium of purchasing books . The ideal customer segment could be reached must faster from affiliate marketing than the traditional mass media television or print advertising . Also customer segments who visited third part websites were most likely to use internet for purchases than customer segments that used television and print media as their primary reference source However , it 's been several years since Amazon started its operations and now there is a sizeable customer segment which uses the combination of internet , television and print as primary sources of information

Hence what affiliate marketing did for Amazon by generating web traffic was

Reaching to the desired target audience

Brand recognition

A lot of ecommerce business models are using affiliate marketing consultants and agencies that place advertisements on related websites and help generate higher website traffic . These consultants do not have a website of their own and act as a common platform between various ecommerce models

Ecommerce

To establish an ecommerce model one needs to take care of several factors . Namely

Is it a stand alone online model or does it support or a traditional brick and mortar model

What is the revenue generation model

What is the target audience and how relevant is an ecommerce model for them

A ) Business Model

In the late 1990 's and early 2000 a lot of ecommerce business ventures were setup . However few survived the dotcom bust . This was partly because they felt that a brick and mortar model is losing its relevance and they caught on to the fad of ecommerce . However as the years have gone by , people have realize that if suitably used both models have their merits and demerits

What is important to take plan is whether a brick and mortar support is needed for an ecommerce model . For e .g . if an ecommerce model revolves around sending across garments and gifts across the world , then does it need to have physical storage outposts to minimize on the delivery of products . There could be purely...