What Is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is an online business model in which online merchants offers commissions to website publishers to refer visitors to the merchants’ sites to purchase a product or service. It can also refer to the simple act of filling up an online form on the merchants’ sites. To put it simply, affiliate marketing is simply the act of referring customers or leads to an online merchant in exchange for a fee.

Amazon is the first big online merchant to popularize the affiliate marketing concept with its own “associates” program back in 1996. Since then, a lot of online merchants have followed and started to integrate affiliate marketing programs into their online business strategies. Recent data has shown that affiliate marketing plays a significant part for any online businesses’ strategies.

Affiliate marketing is a win-win concept for both the online merchant and its affiliates.

The online merchant has no overheads to pay other than the initial costs in setting up an affiliate program as the affiliates are all working under commissions basics. The online merchant only needs to render commissions to its affiliates when they refer a customer who either purchase something or fill up a form. The online merchant will also stand to gain in the form of free advertising and more exposure for it products and services through the offer of an affiliate program. With the bulk of marketing and advertising left to affiliates, the online merchant can focus on other core marketing and business strategies to grow and expand the business.

As for the affiliates, affiliate marketing remains one of the best ways monetize their websites. With no inventory and other overheads to worry about, an affiliate is leave with the task of just referring customers or leads to the online merchant for a commission.

As affiliate marketing starts to gain in popularity and acknowledgement as an essential online marketing strategy, a lot of companies started to develop their own affiliate programs. And as online merchants rush to develop their own affiliate programs, a new type of service websites sprung up that is devoted to managing these affiliate programs – Affiliate Networks. Most online merchants lack the necessary resources and knowledge to manage an affiliate program of their own and this creates a window of opportunity for “Affiliate Networks” to tap into.

Within the space of a few years, affiliate marketing has become the driving element of how commerce works on the internet. And it should stays that way until someone came up with a better method of conducting commerce on the internet.

While, affiliate marketing may seem easy at first glance, there are many factors involved. Nowadays, more and more offline businesses are turning to the internet to market their businesses and this in turn creates more opportunities affiliates to make serious money from affiliate programs.