Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is a very simple business system and is ideal for people with entrepreneurial mindsets.

The Affiliate Marketing industry has four core players at its heart: the Merchant (also known informally as 'Retailer' or 'Brand'), the Network, the Publisher (also known informally as 'the Affiliate') and the Customer.

Currently the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling, and retail industries. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from business-to-business marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as part of their mix. The phrase, "Affiliates are an extended sales force for your business", which is often used to explain affiliate marketing, is not completely accurate.

Merchants favor affiliate marketing because in most cases it uses a "pay for performance" model, meaning that the merchant does not incur a marketing expense unless results are accrued (excluding any initial setup cost).

The goal of affiliate marketing is directed toward long-term and mutual beneficial partnerships between advertisers and affiliates. Cost per sale and revenue sharing are the primary compensation models for classic affiliate marketing, and are rarely found in cost per action networks. Conventions are regularly held and attended by thousands of people and there's even an offline magazine devoted entirely to the subject of affiliate marketing.

Perhaps the simplest way to explain affiliate marketing is that it is a way of making money online whereby you as a publisher are rewarded for helping a business by promoting their product, service or site.

Advertisers often prefer affiliate marketing as a way to promote their products because they know they’ll only need to pay for the advertising when there’s a conversion. Publishers often prefer affiliate marketing because if they find a product that is relevant to their niche that earnings can go well in excess of any cost per click or cost per impression advertising campaign. Perhaps the biggest of these reasons is that affiliate marketing seems to work best when there’s a relationship with trust between the publisher and their readership. Of course this can also be a negative with affiliate marketing – promote the wrong product and trust can be broken.

While affiliate marketing can be incredibly lucrative it is important to know that affiliate marketing is not easy money. There’s also some risk associated with affiliate marketing in that if you push too hard or promote products of a low quality you can actually burn readers and hurt your reputation and brand. It’s also worth noting that affiliate marketing doesn’t work on all blogs.

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that it does not require you to have your own website, handling customers, product development and after sales service. I do quite a bit of affiliate marketing on my blog, mostly with Clickbank.

I do hope you've enjoyed reading about affiliate marketing. I've managed to be very succesful with this section of the industry and I hope that you're able to as well.