Affiliate Networks
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing has grown fast in the last couple years, without many people knowing much about it.
in the mid-90's Amazon.com started the idea by enabling Web site owners to link to their books and earn a commission if someone clicks over from their Web site to Amazon and purchases the book.
Now almost every large e-commerce web site has some sort of affiliate program. They commissions and incentives for other Web site owners to promote their product or service. This has proven to be a fast and inexpensive way to grow an online business.
How does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Affiliate Marketing is becoming a popular method of promoting web sites in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided. The affiliate is rewarded for each visit (Pay-per-click), registrant (Pay-per-lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay-per-Sale).
The most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing, from the merchant's viewpoint, is that no payment is due to an affiliate until results are produced.
Some e-commerce sites, such as Amazon.com run their own affiliate programs while other e-commerce vendors use third party services provided by affiliate network companies who track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates. Many online businesses owe much of their growth and success to this rather new and fast growing marketing practise.
Advantages for Website Owners (Affiliates)?
There are many affiliate marketing companies who act as an intermediary between merchants (website operators) and affiliates (website owners/marketers) to promote websites and handle all the associated transaction tracking and commission distribution.
By displaying banners and text links of particular merchants on your website, this allows you to earn commissions by referring traffic from your website to the merchant website.
Setup is quick and easy, simply paste a small amount of code into your web page to get merchant banners to display.
Advantages for Website Owners (Merchants)?
By joining a Affiliate Merchant program you are able to promote your website and only pay commissions on what you sell. This will help you increase sales whilst the online reporting and sales tracking can help you target your advertising.
By joining one of the many affiliate network companies you can actively seek quality affiliates to start promoting your website. Many of the affiliate companies offer the CPC (Cost per Click), CPL (Cost per Lead) and CPS (Cost per Sale) options for promoting your site.