Affiliate marketing is different things to different people, but essentially, affiliate marketing is the act of marketing products that are owned by somebody else. Affiliate marketing is a recession proof way to make money online through top rated affiliate programs and affiliate networks.
Affiliate marketing is something you probably encounter every day on the web – but you may not even realize what it is.
Affiliate marketing is a very lucrative revenue sharing venture between a website owner and an online merchant. The website owner will place advertisements on his websites to either help sell the merchant's products or to send potential customers to the merchant's website, all in exchange for a share of the profits.
Affiliate marketing is also called "performance marketing", in reference to how sales personnel are typically compensated. This type of person (an affiliate) are normally paid a commission for each sale they make, and are sometimes paid performance incentives for exceeding their targets
An affiliate is like a middle man (or woman), who find people who have a need or problem that needs solving and they put them in contact with someone who has a solution.
Affiliates are not employed by the advertiser whose products or services they promote. More often than not the compensation models applied to affiliate marketing are very similar to the ones used for people in the advertisers' internal sales department.
Some people look upon affiliates as an extended sales force for their business. But, this is not completely accurate. The main difference between the two is that affiliate marketers provide little if any influence on a possible prospect in the conversion process once that prospect is directed to the advertiser's website. Whereas the sales team of the advertiser, however, does have the control and influence up to a certain point from when the prospect signs the contract or completes the purchase.
More often than not searching on Google for something like internet marketing, will produce a lot of websites that are more than likely affiliate sites. These sites may have a whole bunch of articles to do with internet which you can read for free. At the same time the site may also give you a whole bunch of examples of paid products that could help you to understand internet marketing. Their site might even review a whole bunch of internet marketing products to give you an idea of what is the best product to buy for your price range.
By clicking on any of the links that are on the website you will end up going to the website that's actually selling the product, an extra bit of information is contained in the link that tells the person selling the product who sent you there.
If you buy something from the website, the person who sent you there gets a commission on the sale.
This form of online marketing is really popular for a number of reasons. Merchants like it because they only have to pay affiliates when they make a sale. Affiliates like it because they can make money relatively easily by promoting other people's products and customers like it because affiliates make it easier to find products and services that they need.
In a nutshell affiliate marketing is a win-win situation for both the merchant and the affiliate because both of them are getting something out of the transaction. The merchant notches up another sale of their product and the affiliate picks up a nice little commission fee which in some cases can be up to in excess of 50 % of the actual price of the product.
