How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Great question! Many people particularly newbies keep asking this question. Many of the questions are concerned mostly about online affiliate marketing even though affiliate marketing can be done offline as well. The real reason for this curiosity is because of the internet which allows many affiliate marketers to leverage easily on web technologies. To do affiliate marketing, first you need a merchant or a company that offers affiliate marketing opportunity or an affiliate marketing program. Next step is to signup directly with the merchants or with an Affiliate Network which may have hundreds of programs to join, making it easy to find affiliate marketing opportunities to your heart’s desire. An affiliate network acts practically like a middleman between merchants and affiliate marketers. They offer tracking software that tracks your sales and reports your sales and performance. They also handle payments for and on behalf of marketers.

Here now is the real business. When you sign-up to an affiliate program, you are provided with promotional material which includes a link and / or banner and links. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to promote these links and banners using your blog, social media pages, or online advertising. These affiliate links lead to the merchant website and come with a tracking code that monitors whether or not the lead buys a product from the merchant. When a person clicks on your promoted link, a signal is sent to your affiliate program’s server notifying them of the referred visit by means of a specialized cookie which chalks up the counter of your referrals. Depending on the merchants, you can get paid-per-visit, PPV or paid-per-click, PPC depending on what the cookies record in your favor. That is how Affiliate marketers get to make their money. Simple business no doubt!


 

Welcome to Affiliate Marketing as a Business

 Well, these days everyone wants to make money online/offline whichever they prefer. Many get involved in promoting products/services and earning a commission from sales. You have probably heard about making money with Affiliate Marketing and wondering what it is all about and how you can tap into the opportunity. I guess your mind is working in the direction many marketers are now earning a decent living.

Now, what exactly is Affiliate Marketing? It means many things to many people depending on how involved they are in the business. It is nothing new or completely novel. Affiliate marketing in its simplest terms means referring people to buy a product or service in return for a commission from the product seller or service provider. 


 

“Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting products or services online or offline in return for a certain percentage as commission for each successful sale from the merchant.”


That is rather simple and straightforward. It can be used for any business. That is exactly why many and varied businesses like Financial services companies such as insurance companies, banks, and asset managers have been using a variant of it for decades to build their businesses. Even though some of these businesses like to call their affiliate marketers such fanciful names as independent marketers, and call the commissions they pay out, performance bonuses, but the bottomline is, it is still affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing may have been around for decades, but its popularity ballooned when the internet happened. With the internet and proliferation of web technologies, affiliate marketing became simpler, attracting more interest from diverse people.

With the internet, Affiliate marketers no longer had to go knocking door to door to make a sale. They can simply unleash the power of web technologies to promote the products or services of their clients. That is one real advantage over traditional door-to-door salesman marketing methods. The internet also ensures that you are no longer restricted to your region to make a sale. That makes it possible to expanding your reach widely and increasing your potential sales volume as a consequence. If you have access to the internet, you can simply sit in your own little corner of the world and successfully sell products to people all over the world.  Same way, you also get paid and receive your commissions as well through same web technologies. All these combine to make Affiliate Marketing a really very exciting type of business.