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Overview of Affiliate Marketing

Written by: Lou Sorell

Article Overview: Explains what Affiliate Marketing is all about.

Overview of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It can involve hosting links, banners, and product information on a website or blog and then getting paid a flat fee or percentage of a sale whenever visitors click through on these links and make a purchase. In essence, affiliate marketing is selling products or services offered by others and then getting paid for each sale.

While search engines, e-mail and website syndication are some of the methods most favored by online retailers, affiliate marketing continues to play an important role in e-retailers' marketing strategies. In fact affiliate marketing often overlaps with other Internet marketing methods because affiliates often use some of the same advertising methods like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), e-mail marketing, paid search engine marketing, and display ads.

The early days of affiliate marketing on the Internet primarily involved Amazon.com and its Associates program, which began in 1996. Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page. When visitors clicked from the associate's website through to Amazon and bought a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon was not the first merchant to offer an affiliate program. Adult content websites had been doing it for years, and CDNOW's BUYWEB program had been around since 1994 using click through purchasing to enable people to buy music albums online. Amazon's program was the first to become widely-known however and has served as the template for what followed.

In a relatively short time, the growth and popularity of affiliate marketing has grown to the degree that it is now a significant force in selling products and services on the web. The e-commerce website, viewed as a novelty in the early days of the Internet, is now an integrated part of the overall business plan of many companies and in some cases has grown into a bigger business than the original offline entity. Thousands of affiliate marketing programs are available that can blend with almost any sort of web content you might imagine and many entrepreneurs have built their business model on affiliate marketing success.

You can now register with one or more various affiliate marketing networks that will not only provide a variety of sites with which you can affiliate, but will also keep track of your affiliate earnings, issue checks, send out year-end tax statements and more. Some of the most popular include Commission Junction, ClickBank, Linksahre and Google (not really an Affiliate network per se, but it does run affiliate products through its AdSense program).

At present, the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling, and retail industries. The sectors that are expected to experience the greatest growths are mobile phone, financial services, and travel sectors, followed by entertainment (especially gaming) and Internet-related services (especially broadband) sectors. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from business-to-business marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as an important part of their business plan.

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Article Tags: adult content websites, advertising methods, affiliate marketing, affiliate program, amazon associates, e mail marketing, individual books, internet based marketing, marketing efforts, marketing methods, marketing on the internet, marketing strategies, music albums, nbsp, online retailers, popularity, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engines, short time
Referred by: http://jaykubassek.com



Related Forum Posts
Re: Affiliate Marketing - Open for Discussion - Carol, Mary and David - thanks for your great input and insight on Affiliate Marketing! This is the kind of discussion I was hoping for in this thread. There are pros and cons to Affiliate Marketing, just as there are to any business. As has been suggested, he best policy is to proceed with caution and do some research before jumping in. As Carol has recommended, this topic thread in the EvanCarmichael.com forum is the ideal place to ask questions and seek further input on available Affiliate Marketing programs. If a person is serious about building an online business and is interested in Affiliate Marketing plans, they should approach the process as they would any other form of business. Research, ask questions, compare opportunities, participate in forums on online business and Affiliate Marketing. GT :-]
Re: Affiliate Marketing - Open for Discussion - Hi GT Affiliate Marketing is one of the easier ways to get started making money online, but it does take quite a bit of work before you see any great results as you have to keep promoting constantly. It does teach you one hell of a lot about all aspects of Internet Marketing though as you will need to learn how to write and submit articles, create and maintain a blog, social networking is a great help to affiliates too..the list goes on and on. In fact from what you learn from Affiliate Marketing you can apply to any niche and be sure to succeed, take care, Carol
Re: Affiliate Marketing - Open for Discussion - You made some very good points here Jeff and I agree with you, Affiliate Marketing should not be something that you concentrate all your efforts into. As i said earlier I have learned a lot with Affiliate Marketing and continue to do so, and it has helped me tremendously to understand what I am going to have to do in my chosen niche(s). I am also being coached by the same group of mentors as GT and we are all moving forward daily to achieve our ultimate goals. Take care, Carol
Re: Should Evan add a "Social Media Marketing" category to the f - Hi, Online Marketing would be a great title, and having sub categories would make it even better, there would plenty of categories to choose from, Social Media, SEO, Article Marketing and yes even Affiliate Marketing to name just a few, great looking site btw Jeff, take care, Carol
Re: Internet Marketing is the best business in the world - No problem. I am also interested in creating an ebook one day and am glad that I can finally contribute to someone who is, maybe not so up to date in an area that I have some knowlege of. Also I forgot to mention Affiliate Marketing from my previous post. Getting others to sell WhyNot's ebooks for him is a great way of promoting as well.


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