Affiliate marketing is having other people promote your products for a cut of
the sale. To get this to work, you would install a special piece of code on
your website which generates special links and code to give to other website
owners.
When they link to your site using the special links and a visitor clicks that
link to your site, the code tracks their visit. If they purchase anything, it
records that a visitor from site so and so spent $XX at your store.
You would then pay that website owner a commission, usually between 3-
10% of the sale. There are plenty of service providers that do all of this
automatically, so you don’t need to worry about the nitty-gritty – just set up
the software and generate links for websites.
Affiliate marketing is only good for you if you have really high margins on
your products. If you are a dropshipper, like me, then your margins are
already tight. Having to cough up another percentage from those already-tight
margins to someone else will leave you with very little.
Quick Tip: Don’t make affiliate marketing the focus of your marketing
efforts. The most effective way to use affiliate marketing is to use it for
roping in a customer with the first sale, and you can really profit by repeat
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business – which won’t come using the affiliate link.
Affiliate marketing software and providers:
Share A Sale affiliate software
iDevAffiliate affiliate software
Disconnections can be
categorized in various ways from the point of view of the user, hand-held
terminal, or the network infrastructure. Disconnections are either predictable
or sudden from some point of view. For
example, voluntary disconnections are predictable from the user point of view.
From the device point of view they can be sudden. Clearly predictable
disconnections from the device point of
view include those that can be detected by changes in the signal strength, by
predicting the battery lifetime, or by utilizing knowledge of the bandwidth
distribution. They become predictable to the user only if the device informs
her about them in advance. Sudden are the disconnections that cannot be
predicted by any of the parties. In general, if the disconnection can be
predicted by the device, it can usually inform the network infrastructure and
the user of the immediate disconnection and then perform it properly. If it is
sudden from the device point of view, there is no time or possibility to do
anything before the connection breaks. Afterwards, the device can of course
inform the user about loss of connection. These are the most difficult situations
from the application point of view. From the communication infrastructure point
of view, there is not much difference whether the connection just breaks or
whether it knows about it just before it happens; sometime after the
disconnection it will anyhow release the resources allocated for the connection
if nothing happens anymore.
From the network and
application architecture point of view, the major factor of non-reachability
and disconnections of the hand-held sets is the C-autonomy of the hand-held
devices. They are not always reachable (typically during the nighttime) and can
become at any time unreachable if the user wants it, or for other reasons
against the users’ will. The better technology we will have, the less cases of non-reachability and
disconnections we will have due to the technical problems and the more of the
cases are directly a consequence of the
C-autonomous behavior of the user against the network. For a more thorough
general analysis of C-autonomy see
(Veijalainen, 1990).
