The power of the affiliates. The birth of mikkle.com

Affiliate marketing is probably the most important part of any commerce platform but not many owners realize this before its too late. For example. Most people who shop online, click a link to get to the site or product. Every link clicked, pays the owner of the web site that referenced you to the site or product.
For the past 2+ years we have been developing presoldtickets.com to sell tickets to predominantly urban events (lol) . So far the site has done pretty well on its own with a customer retention / repeat rate of about 70% so we must be doing something right. This traffic is brought to us by the ‘if we build it they will come’ mentality.
Terrible.
The next phase of the company called for additional revenue from advertising. Mainly google adwords. This, though successful could lead to something bigger. We were promoting goods and services for manufacturers and generating advertising dollars based on clicks on the website. So we decided to link to the products so that we could legitimize the content we were providing.
Now what if we could earn from these links, every time someone who clicked on that link and actually purchased the product ? Stocking and selling was not an option since overhead to profit ratio would just not be worth the time.
What we came up with, was the option to link to the product, from our site, with a tracking code that gave the e-commerce site we had linked to, a way to show that we had generated that sale. The e-commerce site in return, gives us a percentage of that sale.
Brilliant.
So why wouldn’t we offer an incentive to the web sites who frequently advertise the events that we are selling tickets for ?
After months of testing and development, we created mikkle.com (from the Jamaican phrase ‘every mikkle makes a muckle which basically means everything adds up) an affiliate site that allowed web masters, who already have advertising in place for the events we sell tickets for to earn, by actually linking these ads to the sale of tickets. Now we have additional traffic (and revenue) and the web masters have financial incentive to send traffic to presoldtickets.com
Let’s see if this works. I believe that we have finally tapped into the resource that drives ecommerce online by once again thinking from another perspective and rewarding those that have a possible financial interest in presoldtickets.com doing well.

- The box is square
Kiwami Livingston