subject: Affiliate Marketing 101 - What Is Affiliate Marketing? [print this page] Just what is affiliate marketing? Just what is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is based on sharing revenue sales between two parties. On one hand you have the merchant, the owner of goods, products and/or services, and on the other you have the affiliate.
Through a unique affiliate link, the affiliate is rewarded for each action the visitor takes based on the merchant's reward system. The affiliate is rewarded depending on which actions the merchant decides to reward their affiliates by. The affiliate (via their affiliate link) may be rewarded by each visitor who clicks on their link, enters certain details such as a name, zip code and email address into a form, or by purchasing a product or service.
For example, if a merchant decides to pay the affiliate for each visitor who purchases a product through their affiliate link, the affiliate is then rewarded a percentage of each sale that occurs through their unique affiliate link.
A numbers example of this would be if a company has a $97 ebook that they sell through their website and then decides they would like more traffic and sales for their ebook. They would then create an affiliate program where affiliates who promote that ebook with their affiliate link will generate (say) %50 commissions for each sale they produce. Each sale produced by the affiliate makes him $48.50, while the other half of that sale goes to the merchant, who did not have to promote and market to generate that sale.
This creates a win-win situation for both parties involved, each makes a profit for each sale that's produced. The more sales made by the affiliate, the more revenue each party will make.
There are literally thousands of merchants who use affiliate programs to grow their business exponentially. Sites like ClickBank have made it easy for merchants to create an affiliate system whereby affiliates can promote their products, and likewise affiliates can sign a form, have their own unique affiliate ID created for them and begin promoting products for the merchant immediately.
This is the essence of affiliate marketing and is one of the greatest ways for anyone to earn a secondary or main income by putting this type of marketing into practice.
Of course, there's more to affiliate marketing than meets the eye.
One of the fastest ways to make money with affiliate marketing is by setting up and creating your own marketing funnel system.
Sure, you can generate a few sales by promoting an affiliate product by various means on the Internet, but I (and countless others) have found it extremely valuable and 10x more powerful to create a system whereby affiliate sales are made one right after the other and on autopilot.
