Affiliate Marketing - A Brief Snapshot

Today everybody is familiar with the concept of online business. A new name in the same line is Affiliate Marketing. It is a way of promoting web businesses between two websites on revenue sharing basis. Under this type of marketing concept the affiliate website shares their visitors while showcasing a banner advertisement of the other website. The affiliate in turn gets compensated for displaying the advertisement of the other website.

It is a kind of mutual business where one party gets paid for promoting the business of the second party. The payment can be in terms of a sum agreed upon fro the total sales, it can be a percentage profit. It is a powerful economic force that combines two different affiliates with a view to maximize their revenues. The affiliates are the partners, merchants and advertisers actually as the sign up to sell the products of other web sites.

In most of the cases the reward or compensation is based on the performance measures. In a simple way it is selling or promoting a website or the content of the website in return of some kind of commission or profit percentage. The parent website uses affiliates for:

1. To generate leads
2. To make a better market reach
3. To penetrate the existing market
4. To expand the business
5. To generate the future leads
6. To conquer the untouched markets

It is considered to be a universally accepted way to do the website promotion where the affiliate gets payment for every visitor, subscriber and customer that he is fetching to the company. In layman terms it is an exercise to pay the individuals for their efforts put in attracting a new customer. A very common word that well describes it is- crowd sourcing. The underlying classifications of this type of marketing are:

1. Organic search engine optimization
2. Paid search engine marketing
3. E-mail marketing
4. Sense display advertising

The parties or the core players that are involved in affiliate marketing process are as follows:

1. A merchant who is considered as the retailer or the brand for the product or the service.
2. Network stands for the publisher working as the affiliate.
3. Customer is the ultimate person who buys.
4. Secondary tier of players, a group of Affiliate Management Agencies, Super Affiliates and Specialized Third Parties vendors, etc.

Affiliate marketing is thus a process to drive out the web traffic to the certified sellers by the affiliates.