What is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice used online where by a business selling products or services can recruit and reward affiliates, generally in the form of a commission payment, think of this like a virtual sales force being paid on a commission only basis.

Affiliate Marketing is an extremely cost effective way of increasing sales and managing a virtual sales team, who are only paid on actual sales. The affiliate is rewarded by the merchant by way of commission when they have directed a visitor to the merchants’ web site and that visitor makes a purchase of goods or services.  The merchant now owns this customer and with effective marketing campaigns delivered to these customers generating additional sales.

There are two sides to affiliate marketing:

The Affiliate: a company or individual promoting a product, products or services on behalf of a business.  Visit this page Affiliates for more information 

Affiliates generally have their own web presence that is used to promote products or services, many affiliates have years of internet marketing experience and can often get their own web sites ranking well in the search engines with hundreds if not thousands of visitors a day.  They understand marketing and how to implement call to actions, pushing the visitor to the retailers or companies web site where a purchase is made.

The Merchant: the company running the programme, a retailer selling products (often referred to as a merchant) or a company selling services i.e. Insurance.  Visit this page Merchants for more information.

Merchants can operate and manage an in-house affiliate programme or sign up with one of the many affiliate networks.   Running your own in-house programme can be time consuming and costly, in addition to making it harder to recruit affiliates that would promote your products. 

There are a number of Affiliate Networks in the UK and US who already have thousands of affiliates on their books, utilising a network and its contacts makes it easier to attract these affiliates to your programme.  Affiliate networks will also look after the day to day tracking code required to ensure that you know which affiliates sent you the visitor and if a sales was made, ensuring that the correct affiliate gets paid. Additionally the affiliate network will look after the payments to affiliates removing the headache of managing this process.