Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an Internet based marketing practice in which a business rewards it's affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's efforts. It all comes down to driving traffic to a businesses site really. If you are a website owner and can help a business in this way, you will be rewarded.

 

 

There are three individuals or groups that are involved in affiliate marketing. The business selling the products, the affiliate promoting the products and the customer who visits the affiliate's website. Usually the affiliate earns a commission on sales of a businesses products but it can be possible to find affiliate marketing schemes that generate revenue on an ad-click basis.

 

Types of affiliate website include:

• Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers' offers (i.e., search arbitrage)
• Comparison shopping websites and directories
• Loyalty websites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back
• 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 (This type of website was the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing; however, such websites are almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate websites.)[citation needed]
• Weblogs and website syndication feeds
• E-mail list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in -mail lists that typically employ e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more content-heavy
• Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website
• Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparisons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates
• Cost per action networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated to their own network of affiliates
• Websites using adbars (e.g. Adsense) to display context-sensitive, highly-relevant ads for products on the site

 It is important that when you are looking into affiliate marketing you do not participate in any schemes that may be spam based, either email or search engine, and do not choose a program that uses adware; spying software illegally placed onto web users computers.

Great marketing schemes I use myself include Click Bank, Amazon Associates and and Google Adsense. I will be reviewing each of these programs in later posts.

Next Time: What Is Clickbank?