Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular business models for many Internet marketers, due to its low barriers to entry. What is affiliate marketing? Before getting into that, we must first understand the term “internet marketing”. Internet marketing, or online marketing, refers to advertising and marketing efforts that use the Web and email to drive direct sales. Basically, using the Internet to sell your products/services. There are many branches of internet marketing.
Essentially, affiliate marketing is just one of those branches. It’s a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
In layman’s terms, an affiliate is a virtual salesperson.When someone buys something from a merchant as a result of his or her actions, they get paid a commission. In the internet marketing world, an affiliate is also known as a publisher.
If you take a closer look at the definition, it states that the affiliate is either rewarded for bringing the merchant a visitor OR customer. This means that different merchants will have different criteria that must be met before a commission is paid to the affiliate.
Some merchants will only pay when the affiliate bring them a sale (Cost per Sale-CPS) whereas others will pay when the affiliate get the customers to perform a particular action (Cost per Action-CPA), such as entering an email address filling up a form, or signing up for a free trial.
Each affiliate is given a unique affiliate link. When the affiliate gets visitors to click on their link to purchase something/take an action, a sale/lead signal will be triggered on the merchant’s end and the affiliate will be paid a percentage of the sale.
Even if the visitor leaves your website, a cookie would have been placed in his/her browser during their visit and the sale/lead signal will be triggered if they buy/perform the action on subsequent visits.
To sum up, now is the best time to get into affiliate marketing due to the abundance of learning material available on the Internet. Affiliate marketing is a great way for aspiring Internet marketers to get their feet wet because the skills associated with becoming an affiliate marketer such as copywriting, website building, list building, and networking can be invaluable when he or she decides to own their own product.