What is Affiliate Marketing?
According to Wikipedia, Affiliate Marketing is:
A marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network, the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’) and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third parties vendors.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
In plain and simple words, it is the digital equivalent of MLM (Multi-Level marketing). I don’t care what the “gurus” tell you; if it looks like a duck, poops like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it’s a duck.
How does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Advertisers populate their ad links in the interface, making them available for placement by publishers. Publishers looking to monetize their traffic apply to join an advertiser’s affiliate program. Upon acceptance to the advertiser’s affiliate program, the publishers select and place the advertiser’s links on their Web sites, in their email campaigns or as part of search listings. Each link is assigned a commission, such as a fixed amount per lead or a percentage of a resulting sale on the advertiser’s Web site.
When a consumer clicks on a publisher’s link, a cookie is set on the visitor’s browser that identifies the advertiser, the publisher, and the specific link and payment rates. When the visitor makes an actual purchase online or fills out a form, that transaction is tracked and recorded.
