The newspapers and media companies forgot what business they were in a long time ago and that is why they are struggling so hard today.

While it’s important to report the news, have great content, blah, blah, blah…, the real business the newspapers and broadcast media are in is the “make the phone ring” or results business.  No business owner buys an ad in the paper because they want to support the paper, they buy ads to make their phone ring and sales grow. Trust me, I have purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of advertising in my local media market, I undertstand fully the love hate realtionship.

The same holds true now for online versions of the media. If the phone is not ringing, no advertiser wants to write the check for the ads.Its a love hate realtionship  with the newspaper or any other media company.

However, the check every business owner is willing to write is a commission check. Commissions means sales took place. This is why affiliate marketing is growing so fast. Bring me buying customers and I will gladly write you a check.

The technology exists today in automated marketing solutions like Infusionsoft, to track your affiliates and the resulting sales. If you examine the math, affiliate marketing is far more profitable than advertising.

Let’s say you have a Internet site that is struggling to monetize through advertising or memberships. Switch to an affiliate marketing model and the world changes. Let’s take a look.

In the advertising model, you sell space. Let’s say for example that a banner ad on your site is $1,500.00.  Nice, you might be able to sell a few banners in a rotation but your space is limited because there is only one banner slot per page. Let’s say you sell 4 of them in a rotation and end up with $6,000.

Now take on the affiliate model and watch the revenue grow.  You still run the banners at a much reduced rate or even free. ( I can hear newspaper or website CEO’s the world over choking on this comment.)

Let’s say your site has a million page views per month. A good conversion rate of 2-3% can be expected off the click through. We will use 2.5% for our math. That results in 25,000 click throughs and lets’ say for example sake that 5% of these click throughs buy or 1250. For our example sake, we will use the Full Strength affiliate model where there is a $5 affiliate fee per sale. The resulting revenue is $6,250.00 for month one.  Full strength is a performance nutrition meal replacement food that helps you lose weight, gain muscle and increase energy. the product is sold as a subscription that the average user stays on the product for 9 months. Now my banner revenue went from $1,500.00 to $56,250.00.  We are not done yet. Hang on to your hat my marketing friends.

Implement a drip system with trip wire or action based marketing and the 25,000 click throughs now result in a much bigger number. Truth is, people buy when they want to buy, not when you want to sell them. So maybe the other 23,750  click throughs just were not ready to buy, they did not have all the information they needed to buy on the spot. Say for example sake that just another 5% buy over a six month process because they were placed in a automated marketing drip systems. In a six month period with 24 touches, they were taught enough to buy. (The automated touches cost 1/5th of  cent per touch so the cost to market to them would be just under 5 cents.)

Now my $1,500.00 banner space results in a $112,500.00 Almost 100 times the revenue of the banner ad. My client Full Strength is elated because of the sales and they did not pay for a banner ad that did not perform.

Results over advertising. It’s now a reality because of technology. If the media companies follow this model, there is no crisis in their industry. There advertisers become partners and everyone wins.

By the way, this does not have to be a media company, social media site or other online property. I can show your organization how to do this with just referral networks of any kind.

Need to know more? Need to know how? Connect with me.

The Attention Connection – “to get attention you must pay attention.”