Thursday, April 10, 2008

Affiliate Marketing for the Beginners

Those who dabble with online marketing or want to get into this very lucrative industry might have come across the concept of affiliate marketing. Basically, affiliate marketing is a form of online promotion where the ads of one business is published on another site that enjoys good traffic inflow and is not related or owned by the business, the ads of which are being published.

Before we get on to more about affiliate marketing, let us clear some of the basic terminologies -

A Merchant is one whose ads are getting published. A merchant is usually one who owns a business or has something to sell or promote. He / she can place an ad for different reasons - for selling or promoting his goods or services, for collecting important data, for leads generation or for getting feedback on his services.

An Affiliate, on the other hand, is one who owns the site where the ads of the merchants get published. Usually an affiliate's site is one that enjoys a reasonably good number of visitors regularly.

Affiliate marketing is a performance driven concept where a merchant has to pay only when a defined goal is accomplished. This goal can be anything that a merchant has to get done, for example getting conversions, accumulating data, leads generation, getting feedback or anything at all. It is when this goal gets accomplished, the merchant pays the affiliate that has brought in the visitor from his site. The amount is fixed at the time of commencement of program.

Affiliate marketing has a lot of benefits for both the merchants as well as the affiliates. For merchants, this reduces the amount that has to be invested for promotion purposes and it also gives more returns on investment. It can also be fruitfully used to get qualified leads or for conversion of visitors into customers.

It is a good money making option for an affiliate since there is no investment or any cost involved. And the affiliate can simply earn by monetizing the web traffic that comes to the site owned by the affiliate. Each time a visitor clicks on an ad shown on his site, the visitor is taken to the destination site of the ad (the merchant's site) where the visitor may perform the activity that has been defined by the merchant. On successfully doing that, the affiliate gets paid a fixed amount by the merchant.

Hence, affiliate marketing is a win-win situation for both the affiliates as well as the merchants and therefore it has gained a lot of popularity from the time of its conceptualization.

About the Author- Naman Jain is an expert in Internet marketing, presently working with Rupiz Media, one of the leading internet marketing company, offering online marketing services, SEO services, web application development and search engine marketing over the globe.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

yes...internet marketing industry is emerging very fastly iver the internet.Affliate marketing is a form of online promotion where the ads of one business is published on another site that enjoys good traffic.
http://www.netcallidus.com

Joseph said...

Thanks for your informative article. I've learned so much from reading it.

It's funny since I've just launched my site which is about affiliate marketing. You want to take a look? I want you to know I'm not trying to sell here at all. I've learned so much from these videos that Michael created and I'm sure you might as well. You can take a look if you want.

Affiliate Marketing

Anyway, thanks for your article. I'll visit frequently.

Warm Regards,
Joseph Park

Anonymous said...

Nice basic rundown of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing appeals to webmasters because of all the things they don't have to do - like stocking inventory, keeping records, shipping, billing, and so on. Add to that the ease of building an affiliate website using templates and it really is appealing!

World internet summit said...

we certainly do enjoy a reasonably good number of visitors...

great run down..

thanks will be back for more

Auto 1 said...

Thanks for the insight there i feel i have got something out of reading your article thanks

Loose weight Quick said...

Great read here very informative thankyou

Nissan 4x4 said...

great thing aswell as being an affiliate you really don't even have to have a website, if you don't want to

Amyrhiz said...

Thanks for those tips you gave. It really help me a lot. I am a totally newbie to this. Keep posting more about it. :-)

Web 2.0 Templates