The low down on Affiliate Marketing

Here’s a basic understanding of Affiliate marketing and what you need to know.

Online Affiliate Marketing is a derivative of Internet marketing where the promoter gets paid for every customer or sales provided by him. Affiliate marketing is the preferred marketing avenue for thousands of Internet marketing experts.

In this type of marketing, affiliate management companies, in-house affiliate managers and third party vendors are effectively utilized to use Email Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, RRS Capturing and Display Advertising for the success of the product.

All the web traffic can be tracked with the help of a third party software in most cases. A lot of work is involved in this process. More than most people understand.

At first marketing by this method involved lots of spamming, false advertising, trademark infringement, etc. But, after the invention of complex algorithms and advance security this has been regularized to make it safer for doing business and shopping online.

This even led to the better scrutinizing of the terms and conditions by the merchants. Affiliate marketing became more profiting with the opening of more opportunities but at the same time it also increased the competition in marketing.

Due to this pressure in house affiliate programs for merchants became a thing of the past and were replaced by out-sourced programs.

The companies that offered this service have expert affiliate and network program managers who have various affiliate program management techniques. These affiliate networks have publishers associated with them who help them with the advertising part.

Affiliate marketing was started by cdnow.com who had music oriented websites. They placed list of music albums on their site and they paid others if they put those links in their websites when a visitor bought their album through their site.

The first company to link with cdnow.com was Geffen Records. Two months later, Amazon was offered by a woman that she would sell Amazon’s books on her website and she should be paid a certain percentage in return if she sold Amazon’s books through her site.

They liked the idea and started the Amazon associates program. It was more of a commission program where they received a commission if a visitor clicked their links and banners on other’s site and bought anything through it.

Since its invention, the affiliate network has been adopted by various businesses like travel, education, telecom, mobile, gaming, personal finance, retail, and subscription sites, the most common being adult and gambling sectors. In the US alone, affiliate marketing produced 4.6 Billion.

The compensation methods used are Cost per sale (CPS), Cost per action (CPA), Cost per mile (CPM) and Cost per click (CPC). The first two are the more famous methods today.

This is because in CPM and CPC, the visitor which turns up on a particular website might not be the targeted audience and a click would be enough to generate commission. CPS and CPA have a compulsion that the visitor not only clicks on the link but also buys something or signs up for some service after it which proves that he is among the targeted audience.

Only in the above case the affiliate gets paid. So the affiliate should try to send as much targeted traffic as possible to the advertiser in order to increase his/her returns and for this reason affiliate marketing is also known as performance marketing because it totally depends on the performance of the affiliate.

The affiliate team can be differentiated from a sales team from the nature of their jobs. The job of the affiliate team is to drag targeted traffic to a point and from that point it’s the job of the sales team to influence the visitor to buy the product or the service.

Affiliate marketing can be extremely effective if used correctly.

This is a very effective kind of method because the money is being paid only when results have been achieved. The publisher incurs all the cost except that of initial setup and development of the program, which is incurred by the merchant. Many businesses give credit to this method of marketing for their success.

I hope my article has given all you Internet Marketing beginners a better understanding of how it all works. I wish you incredible success. Feel free to browse my more advanced articles on Affiliate marketing and social media.


I hope you found this article useful. Feel free to leave me a comment.

To Your Success,

Chad Timothy
http://www.chadtimothy.com/
http://www.softwarebillionsclub.com/
Chad Timothy's 500K Instant Cash Flow System

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http://www.chadtimothy.com/ Chad Timothy is the CEO of the Software Billions Club in Portland, OR. Having started off in Internet Marketing in 1998 Chad Timothy is considered a respected pioneer. He is committed to helping others by writing about what he has learned about strategic Internet Marketing.

In addition to developing scores of websites and online stores and consulting with many companies large and small, he is the author of hundreds of articles and more than a dozen books on Internet marketing and e-commerce.

The Software Billions Club can be found at http://www.softwarebillionsclub.com/

Watch for our new Internet Billions Club membership site to launch soon http://www.internetbillionsclub.com