Overview

Setting up an affiliate program to achieve market share involves research into your niche, identifying if you want to have many affiliates, or a select few, and building your sales force. In order to achieve competitive lockout, a pre-emptive strike into the your industry online must be taken. Email is a critical factor to your success.

The best affiliate programs treat this marketing as a lead generator, focusing on 1-5 products, and then introduce customers to the wider selections that may be available. Large catalogs online have not succeeded, for the most part because of a lack of thinking like the customer. This approach diminishes sales, often because the customer is given so many choices. Clicking and searching through catalogs does not generate results; in reality, it creates multiple buying decisions for the customer.

When faced with multiple choices, most will leave and may decide to come back again if reminded via email. If you send them to the your home page and do not encourage immediate email contact and reward them for it, it is likely you will gain lots of traffic but few sales.

In the following action plan, we will outline ways to target your niche markets and convert those leads to customers. By focusing on conversion of prospects to customers via affiliates, email, and your customer loyalty program, you can build a tremendous email list of customers which will spur growth by doing the following:

• Build your email list throughout the site. Email drives the affiliate industry online; use this to your advantage. When someone enters from an affiliate's site, offer products and a way to join your customer loyalty program. Give them an immediate benefit, like a gift certificate, for filling this in. Every marketing effort you make should drive them to join your email list, because most people do not buy until 3-4th contact.

• For each target market you develop, create portal entry points of specific products for these niches. If you are advertising to students, for example, lead them to the affiliate "students" page, with a selection of 3-4 featured products. Do not send people to your home page with thousands of items; focus them on specific buying decisions.

• Build your affiliate network via Tier One, Two, and Three sites with specific benefits for each. Emphasize the average price per sale, and the stature in a travel industry where people commonly spend thousands of dollars online, as a primary benefit, especially to the Tier Two and Three sites (Tier sites described below).

• Manage your network and convert affiliates to customers as well; if someone does not sell for you, it is likely they will want to buy from you and save money. This is an excellent strategy for Tier Three sites especially, where you can develop a list of tens of thousands of prospective customers by first approaching them as affiliates.

As you create your own affiliate business plan, remember to think of the two target markets for your efforts. The first are your affiliates, who own the Web Sites and email mailing lists that you need to reach; make your offer appealing to them by providing a good incentive for them to work with you. Your second market are your customers; where do they meet online and who are your key affiliate players to reach these people?

At the center of everything should be the email mailing list you develop; whether via your Web Site, your affiliates, or any other marketing efforts, your ability to quickly register people into your database and begin personalized marketing will help you create market share.