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Since its inception in the late 1990s, affiliate marketing has developed into one of the most successful online sales vehicles. In short, it is a performance based marketing model in which a business awards its affiliate sellers for each visitor or customer that they direct to the business.
In practice this involves other people advertising your business or your products and services on their own internet channels. For every sale that they secure, your business pays them a fee or a commission. The affiliate marketing industry has four core components: the merchant who has the goods or services that are offered for sale, the network that provides the affiliate links, the publisher of the affiliate links and, finally, the customer. This type of internet marketing commonly overlaps with other online advertising because it uses many of the same tools, most commonly SEO and click through advertising.
To set up an affiliate selling program, businesses register with one of the affiliate networks like Click Bank or Commission Junction and offer their products to people that have internet properties like websites and blogs, offering the opportunity to earn money from their online presence. These offers are usually much more lucrative for the webmasters than the income from using simple banner ads or PPC placement on their site which often only generates a few cents per click or impression. Affiliate advertising is especially appealing to bloggers who can use content marketing to sell the products that they are affiliated with via the search engines as well as by ad placement on their websites.
There are a growing number of affiliate networks on the web at the moment and they often specialize in specific industries or niches. Some, like Click Bank, assist affiliate marketers with every step of the process of developing an online presence that is designed to be a platform for selling products. Click Bank takes these "infopreneurs" through the development and design of their website, connects them with their network of merchants and then handles much of the administration like paying commissions and dealing with customer enquiries.
Less comprehensive affiliate networks, like Commission Junction, specialize in connecting the merchants with the marketers, targeting people that have an already established online presence. They are focused on recruiting the right affiliate advertisers for merchants, matching them to the publishers that will provide the results in sales that will benefit both partners. There are also affiliate programs that are focused on specialist niches, like MarketHealth who are specialists in the health and beauty industries. These sorts of networks provide an extensive range of affiliate programs that are focused on specific areas and products within the overall industry so that they can be matched more accurately with the publishers that will produce the best sales traffic.
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