There are many ways that you could use to get more traffic to your site, banner exchanges, link sharing, SEO, and Adwords just to specify a few.

All these methods are going to cost you, some will cost you money, some will cost you time others will cost you visitors; you surely know about all these methods and it's benefits and drawbacks. Am I saying that affiliate marketing is free or will cost you no effort? Nope! It will cost you more or less the same ammount of time and even more dedication at start. In echange, affiliates could cost you no upfront money and will pay off really better in the long term.

AdWords or CPM advertising, can get you visitors very fast, but you will soon find out that these usually are easy come easy go visitors with no benefit to your bussines, faster in the short term, very expensive in the long run.

So, what makes affiliate marketing different or special? Keep reading on to discover the fruits of perseverance...

What makes affiliate marketing different or special?

There are tons of minor reasons to go with Affiliate Marketing but let´s concentrate on the most important:

1) Spending money is not mandatory! while you always have to put some money upfront with the majority of useful trafic driving solutions like Google AdWords CPC or buying CPM impressions on good related sites, with affiliate marketing you can start with no cash at all.

2) Secure investment: With affiliate marketing, you won't get riped, specailly if you run your own affiliate program with Jafilia or any other affiliate manager software where you can have control over all the parts of your program.

3) While banners and AdWords links to your site won't benefit its pagerank or improve your SEO, affiliate links do. This is because search engines discard the known advertising network domains in order to give better search resultsby protecting they're crawlers from being fooled by advertising ads and links, but your site is not listed in these big advertisers lists, Is it?

4) ROI is guaranteed! This is probably the most important of all reasons. When you use for example Google's CPC Ad Words or you buy CPM ads on a good, carefully chosen site, you really don't know what the performance of these investments will be, you don't exactly know what the Return Of your Investment (ROI) will be, sometimes it is good, sometimes it is bad; now if you could average what your ROI is accounting good and bad campaings, you would probably get a pretty hi averaged price.

No meter if you want to make sales or promote signups on your blog, with Jafilia, you just pay your affiliates once you get what you need.

With CPC and CPM, you must always pay in advance, or at best you pay just in time, on every click, but you can not know in advance what the result of the operation will be, the visitor can make a purchase, or just go away from your site, in any case, you have alreadt paid the cost of this visit no metter if it is for good or just bounced.

With your own affiliate marketing program, you have full control of your campaing AND you just pay for successful operations, that is, you don´t have to worry never more about your ads being published in unknown click scavenger sites, you will never more pay for unperforming ads and the best of all, you only pay when your objective is met.

Let´s compare Affiliate Marketing with AdWords:

With Adwords:

You pay for the clicks no matter the result.

You get no usefull feedback other that the words people picked to come to your site.

You can be cheated by scavenger sites and automated bots clicking on your ads.

You have little or no control on where your ads are shown

You are entitled to do all the ad testing for every new ad.

You have to pay actually for testing new stuff.

With your own Affiliate tracking software:

You just pay for your affiliates for visitors that are actually buying or performing any desired activity such as signing up on your site

Your affiliates become a very powerfull source of feedback.

The affiliates look for the best performig products for they're sites.

The affiliates test and choose the best placement for the ads.

The testing of new ads and positions is performed by your affiliates.

Why everybody is using AdWords if affiliates are so good?

People love AdWords because they can see people coming to they'r sites the same day or the next day of starting a new campaing, but trust me, this can get pretty expensive, and requires an expert manager to be succesful, specially for higly competitive markets. 

Just think about it for a second, Which are the most succesfull sellers on the internet? Amazon and Ebay probably... well, they both base they're marketing on affiliate networks. Amazon has a network of more than 500.000, yes half a million affiliates. Why? because affiliates are nearly worry free and hands off, so you can concentrate in better product and better campaings instead of micromanaging your AdWords.

Out of the 100 online retailers ranked by Internet Retailer website as the “Hot 100 Retail Web Sites”, 75 have affiliate programs. 

How do I start my Affiliate Campaing?

Mmmmm... Worry fee and hands off! So, after installing Jafilia, millions of people will come and purchase on my site?

Nope! you will have to promote your program before they come.

And here comes in play the second big advantage of having your own Affiliate tracking system setup. It is called Niche marketing.

When you promote your product directly with CPC or CPM campaings, you have to make one or more ads for your shop or even ads for every product and then start searching the net for good matching sites or test drive different CPC ads and campaigns on your own in hope to find out that good spot where your stuff sales well, some products do, some don't and it is your time and money that will be spent to find it out. With every new product, you will probaly have to re-start testing and searching the net all over again.

With Jafilia, you spend your time and/or money finding a good niche witch is much easyer and cheaper than spamming the entire Internet in hopes that some people buy your stuff...

What you have to do is look out for sites or blogs with reasonable levels of traffic on the internet, you will have to specifically look for sites that are related to your product or topic. And then you have to get in touch with the owners of these sites, yes sometimes that is not a piece of cake. This is the most important part and can take big ammounts of time and will require you to be open minded and a good relationship starter and manager; trust me, the effort pays back.

When you finally find a few nice and willing webmasters, make them a good proposal that benefits you both and voilá, they will put some form of advertising of your shop at they'r sites, they will help you making better ads and campaigns, and they will get paid for a good and well done job.