Affiliate Marketing

Introduction

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliates marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affilate management companies and in-house affiliate mangers, specialised 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners. Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regularadvertising methods. Affiliate marketing - using one site to trive traffic to another- is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. Affiliate sites are often categorized by merchants (advertisers) and affiliate networks. Affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained within the website. Affiliate marketing is driven by entrepreneurs who are working at the forefront of internet marketing. Affiliates are the first to take advantage of new emerging trends and technologies where established advertises do not dare to be active. Afffiliate marketing is supposed to be about long term and mutual beneficial partnerships between advertisers and affiliates. Whille search engines, e-mail, and RSS capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliatescontinue to play a significant role in e-retailers strategies. The new media allowed merchants to get closer to their affiliates and improve communication between each other. 80% of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) as compensation method, 19% use cost per action (CPA) and the remaining 1% are other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost permille (CPM), The risk and loss is shared between the affiliate and the advertiser. For this reason affiliate marketing is called "performance Marketing", in reference to how employees that work in sales are typically being compensated.

Successful affiliate programs require a lot of maintinance and work. A larger number of advertisers started to adjust their affiliate program terms to prohibit their affiliates from bidding on those type of keywords. Some advertisers however did and still do embrace this behaviour of their affiliates and allow them, even encourage them, to bid an any term they like, including the advertisers tradmarks. This is also one of the reasons why most affiliates fail and give up before they "make it" and become "super affiliates" who generate $10,000 and more in commission (not sale) per month. The only places where the different people from the industry, affiliate/publishers, merchant/advertisers, networks and 3rd party vendorsand service providers like outsources program managers come together at one location are either online forums and industry trade shows. The forums are free and even small affiliates can have a big voice at places like that, which is supported by the anonymity that is provided by those platforms. There are no industry standards for training and certification in affiliate marketing. Only a few college teachers workwith internet marketers to introduce the concept of affiliate marketing to students majoring in marketing for example. Other resources used include web forums, blogs, podcasts, wideo seminars and specialty websites that try to teach individuals to learn affiliate marketing. Traditional affiliate marketing is resources intensive and requires a lot of maintinance. Most of this includes the management, monitoring and support of affiliates. Increasingly,voices in the industry are recommending that "affiliate marketing" be substituted with an alternate name. The problem with the term affiliate marketing is that it is often confused with Network-marketing or multi-level marketing.

Internet Marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the internet, including design, development, advertising and sales.

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