Affiliate Marketing: The Naked Truth

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the revenue sharing between online advertisers and online salespeople. The compensation is based on performance measures; in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a hybrid model. It is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.

Picture a industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing internet marketing; affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners. This is what affiliate marketing looks like.

It did overlaps with other internet marketing methods since affiliates often use regular advertising methods such as organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising.

Who are the affiliate merchants?

The advertisers are referred to as affiliate merchants. They are those who wanted to sells their merchants/ goods.

Who are the affiliates?

We, as the publisher or salespeople are referred to as affiliates.

What are the benefits of affiliate marketing?

There are lots of benefits of affiliate marketing such as the potential for automating much of the advertising process by accepting and approving applications, generating unique sales links, tracking and reporting of results; and payment only for desired results

Proof?

Affiliate marketing has contributed to the rise of many leading online companies. We take Amazon.com as example. Amazon.com is one of the first significant adopters which now has hundreds of thousands of affiliate relationships.

however, do seek info on which affilates programes are legitimate.
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