In affiliate programs, you pay people or companies when they earn you a sale or introduce new target customers to your product.

A widespread example is bloggers who promote products. These bloggers receive a percentage of every sale made through the product links on their blogs.

Major companies who use affiliate marketing are Amazon, Zappos, eBay, Orbitz, and Netflix.

Affiliate programs work best for retail, information products, and businesses that rely on lead generation.

Retail affiliate programs

Amazon, Target and Walmart are the biggest retail stores with affiliate networks.

Amazon pays between 4% and 8.5% per sale depending on the seller’s performance.

Many smaller retailers who can’t coordinate their ow...

Social ads are ads placed on social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter etc.

Display ads are the banner ads you find across the web.

This is a very large and popular marketing channel.

Why social and display ads?

These ads are mainly used for two purposes:

• To build brand image and increase awareness
• To get a direct response (like signing up or making a purchase)

Social ads can also gain you fans that engage with your brand and eventually turn into customers.

What are social ads?

Sales is a great way of scaling up businesses that sell expensive or enterprise products because customers of such products tend to prefer a certain degree of interpersonal interaction before making a purchase. In order to optimize growth via this channel, you need to design and implement a repeatable sales process. There are three parts to this process:

• Generating leads
• Qualifying leads
• Closing leads

At medium and large firms, the first two are handled by the marketing team while the third is handled by the sales team. At early stage companies that are finding their first few customers, all of these steps are handled by members of the sales team itself. This article will take you through the sales process from the perspective of an early stage company trying to acquire its first few customers an...