Monday, 14 September 2009

What You Need To Know About Affiliate Marketing And The Affiliate Networks

By Ron Cripps

What Is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a commonly known term used to portray the promoting of online businesses by the means of affiliate programs and the promotion of these products on business sites and it dates back to the mid 90's.By doing this the business owner pays the affiliate (also known as the publisher) a decided percentage of commission based on the amount of business their website brings the merchant company. Some companies such as Clickbank, Paydotcom and Shareasale typically have set percentage rates for affiliates which can be up to 75% for some products. Some consider affiliate marketing to be a form of revenue sharing or another term regularly used is commission based advertising.

In the first days of affiliate marketing, it was linked as another mode of network marketing or multi-level marketing (MLM) and as a product of this misconception allot of online businesses made the decision to use the term performance marketing to steer clear of any relationship to affiliate marketing. This was also a problem for affiliates as well, people had a propensity to frown on everything that even looked like multi-level marketing.

Over time and with much perseverance from those that are now recognized as super affiliates it has turned out to be the most cost effective way for merchants to market their products or services online as it is very efficient in the fact that the affiliate has to do all the work to make the sale. So as a result of this, many online companies especially those that embraced this form of marketing in the beginning owe a tremendous amount to affiliate marketing as a perfect example just take a look at amazon.com and the way it has become the done thing for online businesses to include affiliate marketing in many of their internet plans to promote their goods.

So Are There Any Benefits To Becoming An Affiliate Marketer

The belief of revenue sharing has been around for some time, long before the internet. But the idea of affiliate marketing has taken it to new levels, and become a primary form of advertising and drawing in business for all types of e-commerce. Internet merchants find affiliate marketing very well advantageous due to the actuality that it presents little to no risk both for the business and the affiliate. The way it works is that the affiliate makes a manner of payment or fixed amount based on the number of sales the affiliate brings to the merchant, either through on-line links on the affiliates website " or through email, blogs, rss feeds and many other kinds of on-line communication.

Some merchants (only about 1% of affiliate marketing) use a cost-per-click payment system but this is now starting to grow as a viable form of money generation from main stream affiliates by using the CPA marketing networks, which simply means that the affiliate earns some form of commission every time a website visitor clicks on an advert on their website or when you send out an email with a link.

Nonetheless in the past and mainly due to the countless "blackhatters"and "fraudsters" online that were taking benefit of this procedure by way of creating such stuff as (ad-ware, sending spam, or useless indexing sites) this mode of reimbursement is now allot more regulated and even to the degree of having IP addresses tracked and accounts canceled if you are generating what is considered as a fraudulent clicks and for many in the past this form of advertising had become too risky for merchants to use.

What Are The Various Forms of Affiliate Marketing

There are a few separate ways that an affiliate can earn commissions online. Firstly you need to decide which of these is correct for you and then join the merchant affiliate program this is so any commissions can be established through any referrals from your affiliate link to the merchant, Here are a number of campaigns that are at this time utilized online today, however you need to read the terms and conditions of each affiliate program you wish to sign up to.

1) Pay Per Click Marketing is in basic terms a strategy of showing advertisements on your affiliate site and you are paid when a customer clicks on that website.

2) Sending Emails To Your List - sending legit emails to your subscribers with your affiliate link embedded "Spam Is Not Tolerated" make sure you study the TOS of the affiliate program before doing this.

3) CPA Marketing when a person registers with a special site, whether its for a newsletter or subscription, free offers from other online businesses are represented and advertised as well.

4) Clickbank, Shareasle, Paydotcom are all affiliate marketing companies they have countless thousands of online products and services for you to select from as well as being free to join. Various programs even comprise a multi-tier or what is called a recurring commission structure set up.

Hopefully our article has helped you to comprehend more about affiliate marketing and we would like to wish you well in all of your undertakings online.

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