Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate:

An affiliate is a commercial entity with a relationship with a peer or a larger entity.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing has become one of the most effective ways to advertise online. It is also one of the easiest ways for anyone with a website to make a profit online. Affiliate Marketing is an agreement between a merchant and a website owner. The website owner, or the affiliate, allows the use of their site for the promotion of the merchant’s products by linking to the merchant’s website. In exchange, the merchant pays a commission to the affiliate on all sales generated by the affiliate. Every time someone clicks on the link on the affiliate website and proceeds to make a purchase, the affiliate gets a commission. The merchant will pay the affiliate only when a customer clicks on the product link and makes a purchase.

Or in other words we can say affiliate marketing is the equivalent of having an army of sales people who will do the advertising and will only get a commission if a customer purchases.

The concept of affiliate marketing:

An Affiliate agrees to display a Merchant’s banners or text links on his or her site. Anyone now looking at the affiliate site has the option of clicking on the banners or links of merchant’s site. By clicking now that visitor came to our site and if interested he or she will buy our products. This action will result in the sale which is tracked by the affiliate site. Every affiliate site has its own software or system through which it tracked the sale. All sales are recorded and commissions are then paid to the Affiliate for the sales they have achieved.

Types of Affiliate Marketing:

Pay Per Click (PPC): PPC is the easiest way for them to earn money. In this affiliate marketing type, the merchant pays his affiliate whenever a visitor is referred to his site i.e. whenever someone clicks through the merchant’s banner or text ads.

Pay Per Performance (PPP): PPP affiliate marketing is the most popular affiliate marketing program. In this type of affiliate program, the merchant only pays the affiliate whenever his referral translates into an action i.e. whenever the visitor he has referred actually buys something from the merchant’s site or when the visitor becomes a lead.

Generally we classified PPP in two types:
a) Pay Per Sale (PPS)
b) Pay Per Lead (PPL)

Pay Per Sale: In a pay-per-sale type of affiliate marketing, the merchants pay the affiliates a certain fee whenever the visitor he has referred to the merchant’s site actually buys something from the merchant’s site.

Pay Per Lead: PPL is mostly used by the insurance and finance and the other companies who rely on leads for their company to grow. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever the visitor he referred to the merchant’s site fills up an application form or any similar form related to the business of the company.

Further we can classify these types of Affiliate Marketing into two types:

a) Single-Tier
b) Two-Tier or Multi-Tier Affiliate Marketing

Single-Tier: In a single-tier affiliate marketing program, the affiliates are only paid based on the direct sales or traffic he has referred to the merchant. PPS, PPL, and PPC are fall under the single-tier classification.

Two-Tier or Multi-Tier: In Two-Tier or Multi-Tier the affiliate is not only paid for the direct traffic or sales that he refers to the merchant’s site, but also on every traffic or sales referred by various other affiliates who joined the affiliate program through his recommendation.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing:

• It gives the merchant a wider market in which to advertise a product or service.
• The more affiliate sites a merchant has, the higher the traffic, which can convert to sales.
• The merchant has to pay only on confirmed sales. We don’t have to pay for pages view, number of clicks etc.
• It brings quality traffic to our website .i.e. the people who are really interested and looking for the services that we provide only visit to our website.
• It is cost effective solution for marketing. We need not to spend money on any paid marketing programs. Secondly every site that provides affiliate marketing programs has specific packages and it totally depends on us what package we choose from that programs.
• Every affiliate site has its own interface which tracks the number of clicks and the clicks which lead to sale. Thus a merchant can monitor in detail about all the products and services which are doing well and the one which are not doing well. Thus helps us to improve ourselves.
• Brand awareness: As your site has increased traffic, our brand gains recognition.

The affiliate marketing programs reduces our dependence on the search engines, Hence these are the some of the benefits of Affiliate Marketing.

For more information please visit the following sites. These are the some of the major sites which deals with Affiliate Marketing.
• http://www.cj.com
• http://www.affiliatebot.com
• http://www.linkshare.com
• http://clickbank.com
• http://www.incentaclick.com
• http://www.adlandpro.com
• http://www.shareasale.com
• https://www.affiliatefuel.com
• https://www.fineclicks.com