Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate MarketingAffiliate Marketing is a derivative of Internetmarketing where the advertisement publisher getspaid for every customer or sales provided by him.Affiliate marketing is the basic for all otherInternet marketing strategies.In this type of marketing, affiliate managementcompanies, in-house affiliate managers and thirdparty vendors are effectively utilized to useE-mail Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, RRSCapturing and Display Advertising for the successof the product. The web traffic can be traced withthe help of a third party or own affiliateprograms. A lot of work is involved in thisprocess. At first marketing by this method

involved lots of spamming, false advertising,trademark infringement, etc. But, after theinvention of complex algorithms and advancesecurity this has been regularized to make itsafer for doing business and shopping online.This even led to the better scrutinizing of theterms and conditions by the merchants. Affiliatemarketing became more profiting with the openingof more opportunities but at the same time it alsoincreased the competition in marketing.Due to this pressure in house affiliate programsfor merchants became a thing of the past and werereplaced by out-sourced programs. The companiesthat offered this service have expert affiliateand network program managers who have variousaffiliate program management techniques. Theseaffiliate networks have publishers associatedwith them who help them with the advertising part.Affiliate marketing was started by cdnow.com whohad music oriented websites. They placed list of

music albums on their site and they paid othersif they put those links in their websites when avisitor bought their album through their site.The first company to link with cdnow.com wasGeffen Records. Two months later, Amazon wasoffered by a woman that she would sell Amazon抯 books on her website and she should be paid acertain percentage in return if she sold Amazon抯 books through her site. They liked the idea andstarted the Amazon associates program. It wasmore of a commission program where they receiveda commission if a visitor clicked their links andbanners on other 抯 site and bought anythingthrough it.Since its invention, the affiliate network hasbeen adopted by various businesses like travel,education, telecom, mobile, gaming, personalfinance, retail, and subscription sites, the mostcommon being adult and gambling sectors. In UKalone, affiliate marketing produced ?2.16billion.

The compensation methods used are Cost per sale(CPS), Cost per action (CPA), Cost per mile (CPM)and Cost per click (CPC). The first two are themore famous methods today. This is because in CPMand CPC, the visitor which turns up on aparticular website might not be the targetedaudience and a click would be enough to generatecommission. CPS and CPA have a compulsion that thevisitor not only clicks on the link but also buyssomething or signs up for some service after itwhich proves that he is among the targetedaudience. Only in the above case the affiliategets paid. So the affiliate should try to send asmuch targeted traffic as possible to theadvertiser in order to increase his/her returnsand for this reason affiliate marketing is alsoknown as performance marketing because it totallydepends on the performance of the affiliate. Theaffiliate team can be differentiated from a salesteam from the nature of their jobs. The job of theaffiliate team is to drag targeted traffic to a

point and from thatpoint it 抯 the job of the sales team to influencethe visitor to buy the product or the service.This is a very effective kind of method becausethe money is being paid only when results havebeen achieved. The publisher incurs all the costexcept that of initial setup and development ofthe program, which is incurred by the merchant.Many businesses give credit to this method ofmarketing for their success.PPPPPWord Count 654