Overview of 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 affiliates marketing efforts. It can involve hosting links, banners, and product information on a website or blog and then getting paid a flat fee or percentage of a sale whenever visitors click through on these links and make a purchase. In essence, affiliate marketing is selling products or services offered by others and then getting paid for each sale. While search engines, e-mail and website syndication are some of the methods most favored by online retailers, affiliate marketing continues to play an important role in e-retailers marketing strategies. In fact affiliate marketing often overlaps with other Internet marketing methods because affiliates often use some of the same advertising methods like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), e-mail marketing, paid search engine marketing, and display ads. The early days of affiliate marketing on the Internet primarily involved Amazon.com and its Associates program, which began in 1996. Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page. When visitors clicked from the associates website through to Amazon and bought a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon was not the first merchant to offer an affiliate program. Adult content websites had been doing it for years, and CDNOWs BUYWEB program had been around since 1994 using click through purchasing to enable people to buy music albums online. Amazons program was the first to become widely-known however and has served as the template for what followed. In a relatively short time, the growth and popularity of affiliate marketing has grown to the degree that it is now a significant force in selling products and services on the web. The e-commerce website, viewed as a novelty in the early days of the Internet, is now an integrated part of the overall business plan of many companies and in some cases has grown into a bigger business than the original offline entity. Thousands of affiliate marketing programs are available that can blend with almost any sort of web content you might imagine and many entrepreneurs have built their business model on affiliate marketing success. You can now register with one or more various affiliate marketing networks that will not only provide a variety of sites with which you can affiliate, but will also keep track of your affiliate earnings, issue checks, send out year-end tax statements and more. Some of the most popular include Commission Junction, ClickBank, Linksahre and Google (not really an Affiliate network per se, but it does run affiliate products through its AdSense program). At present, the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling, and retail industries. The sectors that are expected to experience the greatest growths are mobile phone, financial services, and travel sectors, followed by entertainment (especially gaming) and Internet-related services (especially broadband) sectors. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from business-to-business marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as an important part of their business plan.

Overview of Affiliate Marketing

By: Lou Sorell

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