Promotion: Affiliate and Link Building

The internet has many places to promote a web site, in addition to search engines and pay-per-click placements.

Affiliate Marketing in recent years has become an integral part of most companies' online marketing mix. Most brand leaders are running affiliate programmes and finding that this is a precious resource of web traffic and is accounting for a higher percentage of overall online sales year on year.

The basic model of affiliate marketing is very simple. A network of website owners (affiliates), are sourced for a company wishing to increase its online traffic (the Merchant). These affiliates will work hard to generate traffic and refer it to the Merchants website. In return they will receive a commission for a desired action taken by each referral; such as a click, application or sale.

Link Building within your trade community

Reciprocal link exchange with your trade community is also important. Having companies related to you reference you as a supplier is also becoming important. The trend is for web sites to form part of larger communities centre round a theme or a trade; being absent from the more important trade communities also detracts from your rankings on the internet.

Building these reciprocal between on-topic web sites is about finding the best trade communities or reference web sites and arranging for links to your site to be included. The process is manual and painstaking but also the most valuable for achieving long term high internet ranking.

Directories like yahoo and trade web sites are in fact important references on the internet. The difficulty of being accepted into these directories guarantees that the businesses included are quality companies.

Getting your company included into the relevant sections of reference directories or trade community web sites will pay large dividends . Being absent from these sites penalizes your ranking long term.

Enclick conducts a link directory submission exercise as part of the search engine optimisation service.