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Affiliate marketing
author: Astrela Ltd.
Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which the business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. There are three main bodies in the affilate marketing branch: the brand/seller, the affiliate, and the costumer. The affiliate marketing uses the tradional advertising methods. These includes search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing and in some sense display advertising.
The affiliate programms use a cuple of technics. These are cost per action (CPA) and the remaining programs use other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM).
Less than one percent of traditional affiliate marketing programs today use cost per click and cost per mille. However, these compensation methods are used heavily in display advertising and paid search. Cost per mille requires only that the publisher make the advertising available on his website and display it to his visitors in order to receive a commission. Pay per click requires one additional step in the conversion process to generate revenue for the publisher.
In the case of cost per mille/click, the publisher is not concerned about a visitor being a member of the audience that the advertiser tries to attract and is able to convert, because at this point the publisher has already earned his commission.
Cost per action/sale methods requires that referred visitors do more than visit the advertiser's website before the affiliate receives commission. The advertiser must convert that visitor first.
The other name of the affiliate marketing is the performance marketing.
Some advertisers use multi-trier programms.Two-trier programs exist in the minority of affiliate programs; most are simply one-tier. Referral programs beyond two-tier resemble multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing, but are different. Multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing have more requirements/qualifications to get paid a commission. Whereas affiliate programs do not.
Some internet users use their own affilaite programm, but there is possiblity to choose only one of the two possibilities (affilate management solution)-standalone software or hosted services, typically called affiliate networks.
Recently, the Internet marketing industry has become more advanced. In some areas online media has been rising to the sophistication of offline media, in which advertising has been largely professional and competitive. The following types of websites are generic, yet are commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers.
- Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers' offers
- Comparison shopping websites and directories
- Loyalty websites
- CRM sites that offer charitable donations
- Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions
- Content and niche market websites, including product review sites
- Personal websites
- Weblogs and website syndication feeds
- E-mail list affiliates
- Registration path or co-registration affiliates
- Shopping directories that list merchants by categories
- Cost per action networks
- Websites using adbars (e.g. Adsense)
There are three primary ways to locate affiliate programs for a target website:
- Affiliate program directories
- Large affiliate networks
- The target website itself
Some commentators originally suggested that affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained within the website itself.
However, more recent examples exist of "thin" affiliate sites which are using the affiliate Marketing model to create value for Consumers by offering them a service. These thin content service Affiliate fall into three categories:
- Price comparison
- Cause related marketing
- Time saving
There are the following affilate services:
- Affiliate programs directories
- Affiliate networks
- Affiliate manager and Outsourced Program Management (OPM or APM) (manages affiliates)
- Internet marketing trade shows
And at the end the affiliate, via the website, drive traffic to a merchant's site. The merchant may be selling a product eg DVDs or e books, or they may be trying to sign on clients eg a bank. The merchant pays you a commission once the visitor has completed the desired action eg bought a product or completed a registration form The merchant knows that the visitor is from you because you link to the merchant's site through a special affiliate link. This link is unique to you and you alone. Other affiliates will have there own special affiliate link which is different from yours. Although different affiliate marketers for the same product have different, unique affiliate links, all these links point to the same website, the merchant's website. The affiliate aims simply to drive as much targetted traffic as possible to the own unique affiliate link. The beauty of this is, once your site is up and running, you can continue to earn money from it whether you are in bed, on holiday or sleeping.
This is called passive income.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Website Promotion Costs .com, Astrela Ltd., 2009
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