Affiliate Marketing and What it Means

Lets define affiliate marketing as a revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a hybrid model.

 

Regular internet marketing techniques are used by the affiliates. Some of the techniques used by the affiliates include organic SEO and email marketing. Affiliates also make use of less orthodox methods to bring in customers. Less orthodox methods include writing reviews about either the services or products offered by the merchant. Affiliate marketing is a marketing in which one website helps another website increase it traffic. This kind of marketing is a low profile when it comes to internet marketing but it is still important when it comes to e-retailers’ marketing strategies.

There are different methods by which businesses compensate affiliates for their work. The methods that these businesses use include cost per mile, cost per click, cost per action, and cost per sale. Most of the businesses choose to use cost per sale method to compensate their affiliates for their efforts.

Two tier affiliate programs are used by the minority among affiliate programs. Single tier is the kind of affiliate program preferred by the majority.

Tracking the contribution of affiliate to the growth of the business can be done using either popular software or by using third party services. There are two different affiliate management solutions that one can choose from – hosted services and standalone software.

Compensation to these affiliates is give by the network or by the merchant directly.

Some of the different types of affiliate websites are personal websites, coupon and rebate websites (these sites focus on sales promotion), and loyalty websites (that have a reward system for every purchase through points or cash back).

Email spamming was a problem faced by affiliate programs. During its infancy period this problem was severe. Merchants have now included terms and conditions in the affiliate programs that prevent spamming by affiliates.

Another problem that affiliate programs had to contend with was Spamdexing. Some of the affiliates have put up sites with only the data feeds that the merchant provides. Search engines have not developed algorithms that either push these sites down or remove them from the search result pages. But such sites still exist and are classified into three categories – cause related marketing, price comparison, and time saving.