Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where businesses reward affiliates for driving traffic or sales to their website. Affiliates promote products or services through unique links, and when a sale or action occurs, they receive a commission. This model allows businesses to expand their reach and increase sales while providing affiliates with an opportunity to earn income through promotion.

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12 Key excerpts on "Affiliate Marketing"

  • Book cover image for: Internet Marketing
    No longer available |Learn more
    ____________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ____________________ Chapter-5 Affiliate Marketing Affiliate Marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network, the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third parties vendors. Affiliate Marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner. Affiliate Marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, Affiliate Marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies. History Origin The concept of revenue sharing—paying commission for referred business—predates Affiliate Marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened in November of 1994, almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web.
  • Book cover image for: Internet Communication
    As Singer (2013) argued, “until the ad in- dustry, technology firms, and advocacy groups come to an agreement … the don’t- track-me browser settings represent little more than symbolic consumer flags that companies are free to ignore.” Affiliate Marketing Affiliate Marketing is that which is conducted by third parties who are compen- sated based on their effectiveness. These third parties, not to be confused with the cookie variety, might be individual users with a personal blog or a professional site dedicated specifically to Affiliate Marketing. Effectiveness is predominantly based on the number of users attracted to a site as a result of affiliate influence or on the amount of sales garnered by an affiliate. An example of a company’s use of Affiliate Marketing is Amazon Associates (www.affiliate-program.amazon.com), which enables members to promote and link to products sold on Amazon in return for a commission on sales resulting from customer referrals. Amazon provides potential affiliate marketers with a va- riety of tools to use in the process. Affiliate marketers in general use a variety of Internet marketing strategies in order to reach consumers. These strategies include banner and email mar- keting techniques, as well as the development of actual websites. For instance, comparison shopping websites, coupon websites, and review websites are often developed by affiliate marketers in order to attract users interested in particular products. 154 | Internet Communication Social Marketing Marketers are increasingly recognizing the influence of relationships through social marketing, that which takes place through social networking sites and through online relational connections among users. Social marketing can be sep- arated into two forms: (a) that which relies on social networking sites specifically and (b) that which relies on relational connections among users.
  • Book cover image for: Digital Marketing Fundamentals
    eBook - ePub

    Digital Marketing Fundamentals

    From Strategy to ROI

    • Marjolein Visser, Berend Sikkenga, Mike Berry(Authors)
    • 2019(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)
    Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based digital marketing channel that is an integral part of today’s marketing mix. A definition for digital Affiliate Marketing is (Wikipedia, 2017):
    Digital Affiliate Marketing
    Digital Affiliate Marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves the web shop (advertiser or merchant) paying the affiliate (publisher/webmaster) for every visitor, lead or sale that he or she generates via his/her website(s), newsletters or search engine campaign.
    Performance marketing
    Affiliate Marketing (also referred to in some countries as performance marketing) revolves around the establishing of certain activities, such as a visit or information request, and/or the sale of services and products from advertisers on partner sites. Affiliates are also called publishers. Affiliate Marketing is characterised by the outright ‘no cure no pay’ principle and is the ultimate ‘performance based’ form of digital marketing. The advertiser only has to pay the resellers (affiliates/publishers) if the results have actually been achieved. The result is determined and settled on the basis of a predefined activity: a conversion. More about conversion objectives can be found in subsection 7.5.2.
    The advertiser is at low risk regarding their marketing and sales budget because of the no-cure-no-pay principle. That is why an increasingly number of advertisers are discovering this form of online advertising.

    7.5.2 The aim of Affiliate Marketing

    For the advertiser, the aim of Affiliate Marketing is always to achieve a direct result. The most common conversion objectives are:
    • sales : purchases, reservations
    • leads : information request, call for tender, newsletter registration
    • traffic : visiting a website
    Looking at these conversion objectives, advertisers often decide to focus on sales or leads. The leads can then be followed up, for example by having a call centre phone them and convert them into a sale after all. The purpose can also be to collect email addresses or other personal data from a specific target segment. This can enrich the advertiser’s customer database. This data can be used at a later stage, for example to send mailings including a special offer. A combination of previously mentioned conversion objectives is also possible.
  • Book cover image for: Online Marketing
    eBook - PDF

    Online Marketing

    A User's Manual

    • Murray Newlands(Author)
    • 2011(Publication Date)
    • Wiley
      (Publisher)
    And the great thing about the Affiliate Marketing community is that it’s full of great people who, like you, once had to learn everything from scratch – and they’re more than willing to help you out. THE BASICS An affiliate is someone who uses their web presence to drive sales traffic to another business. The affiliate earns money for each sale (conversion) that they bring to the company. For example: Company A (a merchant/advertiser) pays a commission to Company B (an af-filiate) for generating sales, leads, or clicks from a graphic or text link located on Company B’s (affiliate) website or Internet reach, which could include email, or social media presence. Affiliate Marketing benefits merchants by producing results-based sales or leads. Growing your business with minimal risk through results-based customer acquisition is attractive to many companies because they only pay for what they get. If affiliates do not make sales or generate leads or if they have a bad day, they don’t get paid. There are a variety of different ways for Affiliate Marketing to work. Online Marketing 182 TYPES OF AFFILIATES Content affiliates Content affiliates have traditionally worked with banners and text links on their websites to drive traffic to affiliate merchants’ websites. Content affiliates are now increasingly collecting email lists and many will have newsletters which they can use to drive traffic to your Affiliate Marketing programs. A content affiliate could be a one-man band with a blog about a very niche subject such as their band. Some of these affiliates can be very small revenue generators. There are however content affiliate bloggers who drive thousands of pounds or dollars of sales per month. There are also an increasingly large number of very big content affiliates who were traditional publishers selling advertising and now also use affiliate links to monetize their content.
  • Book cover image for: Data-driven travel marketing
    eBook - PDF

    Data-driven travel marketing

    The importance of business intelligence for affiliate marketing in the travel industry

    • Jacqueline Schmittem(Author)
    • 2021(Publication Date)
    • LIT Verlag
      (Publisher)
    Definition and differentiation 25 3 Affiliate Marketing This chapter is dedicated to the online marketing tool Affiliate Marketing. It examines its definition, differentiates it from other online marketing tools, shows basic functional elements and highlights its general im- portance and relationship to the travel industry. 3.1 DEFINITION AND DIFFERENTIATION Generally speaking, Affiliate Marketing is an approach being used to mar- ket one’s product or service in the digital world (Patrick & Hee, 2019, p. 703). It is defined as an Internet-based tool that has the aim to distribute products or services and generate sales while communicating actively with the different customers. Furthermore, it has to be mentioned that this online marketing approach has proven to come with very little financial risk for all parties being involved (Bormann, 2019, p. 21). As a consequence, it is one of the most popular online marketing instruments (Chachra, Savage, & Voelker, 2015, p. 41). Moreover, Affiliate Marketing is one of the oldest online marketing practices, as it is originating in the mid 1990s. Even though a lot of people accredit Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for the inven- tion of Affiliate Marketing, it has actually been developed by William J. Tobin in 1994. The founder of an online platform designed a specific framework of tracking and compensating sales successfully, being pa- tented in 1996. However, even though the invention of Affiliate Marketing is nothing Amazon can be accounted for, it can be said that the company owns the oldest active affiliate programme in the world (Bormann, 2019, p. 21). In fact, Amazon has managed to select Affiliate Marketing as their main business model and it reached about 60,000 registered partners on their website within the first year of operating (Lammenett, 2019, p. 63). Having said this, the functional principle of Affiliate Marketing is further explained in the subsequent chapter 3.2.1.
  • Book cover image for: Get Rich Click
    eBook - ePub

    Get Rich Click

    The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet

    Suppose a website called ABC.com pays website XYZ.com a commission for each visitor or new client XYZ sends to the ABC website. This process is known as an “affiliate” relationship.
    XYZ has no investment in ABC’s product or service. ABC doesn’t pay XYZ unless the referred party takes the agreed-upon action on ABC. This might be making a purchase or just registering the referred party’s e-mail address. Some firms will pay for a lead while others pay only for an actual sale.
    Essentially, Affiliate Marketing means paying the owner of one website to direct traffic to another website for a fee or a percentage of the sale that is made. In the Get Rich Click spirit of making money while investing little or no money of your own, affiliate programs are one of the very best ways to profit from the Internet.
    Affiliate Marketing benefits both the affiliate and the merchant. As an affiliate, you can generate income from traffic to your website. If you choose your affiliations well, you also increase the value to your site visitors. Meanwhile, merchants get more traffic to their sites. Because this traffic arrives through a referral, it’s predisposed to make a purchase. Assuming the customer is satisfied, Affiliate Marketing can be a win/win/win business model for everyone involved.
    Businesses find Affiliate Marketing attractive because most programs use a “pay for performance” model. Compare this to traditional forms of advertising. Creating a television ad and buying the air time for it is expensive – and there is no guarantee the ad will be a success. In online Affiliate Marketing, businesses pay only for results.
    For example, Amazon Associates, the Affiliate Marketing program of Amazon.com, has marketed Amazon.com across millions of websites since July 1996. Through this program, Amazon has acquired millions of customers without incurring the expenses associated with traditional branding campaigns or maintaining a dedicated sales force. Amazon Associates is among the largest and most successful online affiliate programs.
  • Book cover image for: Small Business Cash Flow
    eBook - ePub

    Small Business Cash Flow

    Strategies for Making Your Business a Financial Success

    • Denise O'Berry(Author)
    • 2010(Publication Date)
    • Wiley
      (Publisher)
    There are mixed opinions about whether to reward your referrers with some type of monetary compensation. Some are prohibited by law. You’ll need to make a decision about how you will compensate your referrer when you get new business. At least send a thank-you note. Whether you send a gift or money is completely up to you.

    Affiliate Marketing

    What exactly is Affiliate Marketing, anyway? Simply stated, it’s pay for performance marketing. You sell someone’s product and they give you a cut of the action. Your portion can be a set percentage, such as 25 percent, or a standard dollar amount. It’s like a referral program. Have you ever referred business to a colleague and gotten something (money or a gift) in return? Same concept.
    Affiliate Marketing leverages off the strategic alliance partnership method of marketing and can provide passive income for your small business. Your company becomes an outsourced sales agent for another company by advertising their products or services.
    Passive income is money you can make with little or no effort involved. It’s all about automation. There are so many choices available choosing a strategy can be hard to narrow down. It can come in many forms: recurring income, residual income, or one-time income. It may originate from a product your company sells, or another company’s product, or an affiliate program of which you are a member.
    There are thousands of affiliate programs available offering a variety of products and services—from those offered by independent small business owners like me to huge affiliate program networks like Commission Junction, LinkShare, ClickBank.
    You can promote just about anything you can think of from insurance to pet supplies to banks, to wireless service and more; the options are pretty much limitless. The best place to start when deciding what to offer is with your existing business. Think about what would add value to your business and browse the affiliate networks to find available products or services, or head on over to a search engine and search for Affiliate plus your topic.
  • Book cover image for: Affiliate Marketing For Dummies
    • Ted Sudol, Paul Mladjenovic(Authors)
    • 2019(Publication Date)
    • For Dummies
      (Publisher)
    Part 1

    Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing

    IN THIS PART … Discover what Affiliate Marketing is and how you can profit from it. Find out why you should become an affiliate marketer. One reason is Affiliate Marketing allows you to avoid the headaches of traditional business. See how to avoid the pitfalls and traps that trip up new affiliate marketers and deny them the success they deserve. Figure out how to use your interests and passions to catapult your Affiliate Marketing business. You can capitalize on what you already know and profit from it. Check out the various Affiliate Marketing programs and networks so you can choose the right ones for you.
    Passage contains an image Chapter 1

    What Is Affiliate Marketing?

    IN THIS CHAPTER
    Defining Affiliate Marketing in a nutshell
    Discovering how the internet plays a role in Affiliate Marketing
    Getting set to become an affiliate
    An affiliate marketer is someone who introduces others to products and services. The affiliate marketer doesn’t develop the product, ship the product, or handle the payment to the merchant. He simply refers others to products and/or services offered on the internet, and when a sale is made, he earns a commission.
    This chapter gives you an overview of Affiliate Marketing: how it works, how the internet plays a role, and how to get started.

    Getting a Handle on How Affiliate Marketing Works

    Referral marketing has been going on for hundreds of years. In pre-internet days, you might have gone to networking events and handed out business cards. The hope was that you would be able to help out a fellow attendee by giving him a lead that would result in a purchase. The attendee you helped with the lead would return the favor. In a sense, referral marketing was a value exchange that could be summarized as “you help me and I’ll help you.”
    However, a lot was left to chance. You weren’t sure whether the cards and leads you handed out would lead to any reciprocal benefit from those you helped. There was no easy way of tracking when purchases were made and the referral sources for those purchases.
  • Book cover image for: Partnership Marketing
    eBook - ePub

    Partnership Marketing

    How to Grow Your Business and Transform Your Brand Through Smart Collaboration

    • Ron Kunitzky(Author)
    • 2010(Publication Date)
    • Wiley
      (Publisher)
    Affiliate Marketing networks allow e-commerce or online sellers of goods and services the opportunity to tap into their partner network of thousands of websites with even more potential customers who are visiting those websites. The model for this mass partnership marketing program involves the customer visiting an affiliate website (also known as a publisher), and that website then referring the customer to a partner website (advertiser). If the customer takes a specific agreed upon action, such as filling out a form, making a purchase or subscribing to a service, from the partner website (advertiser), then the partner website pays a commission to the affiliate (publisher) for that customer referral. All of this is carefully tracked online with accurate reporting in real time.
    LinkShare (linkshare.com ), Commission Junction (commissionjunction.com ) and Share a Sale (shareasale.com ) are some of the more common online Affiliate Marketing networks. Specifically, LinkShare provides advertisers with an online marketing channel for finding new customers, by acting as the third party that brings together advertisers and publishers. LinkShare’s value proposition, according to their website, is that by choosing LinkShare, you tap into deep online marketing knowledge and experience combined with unique and patented technologies that help turn traffic into sales. What makes affiliate marketing networks interesting is that they cater to virtually any type of business that is communicating with their customers in an online forum. This is because you can join such a program as either a publisher or an advertiser.
    Generally, there is no cost for a publisher to join the program. The advertiser, however, has to pay to initiate their programs and usually has to reach minimum targets for transaction revenue or pay a monthly fee to the publisher if that minimum is not reached.
    Affiliate Marketing networks can be an effective way for online sellers to leverage a group of affiliates to drive traffic to their website. The key is to be sure that you, as the advertiser, are converting a fair number of the visitors that the network drives for you into paying customers, especially if you are paying any additional fees beyond a commission (for not meeting minimum targets) to the affiliate to be in the program. Costs can escalate, resulting in a wasted opportunity and in a negative return on the investment that was made. Keep track of those costs and see if you can have a trial run on the networks before participating over a longer term.
  • Book cover image for: Information Technology Management
    Business models Internet marketing is associated with several business models: • E-commerce – In this model, goods are sold directly to consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B) or consumer to consumer(c2c) • Lead-based Websites – Strategy where an organization generates value by acquiring sales leads from its website ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ • Affiliate Marketing – The process in which a product or service developed by one entity (e-commerce business, single person, or a combination) is sold by other active sellers for a share of profits. The entity of the product may provide some marketing material (sales letter, affiliate link, tracking facility), however, the vast majority of Affiliate Marketing relationships come from e-commerce businesses that offer affiliate programs. • Local Internet Marketing – Strategy through which a small company utilizes the Internet to find and nurture relationships that are to be used for real-world advantage. Local Internet marketing uses tools such as social media marketing, local directory listing, and targeted online sales promotions. • Blackhat Marketing – This is a form of Internet marketing that employs deceptive, abusive, or less than truthful methods to drive web traffic to a website or Affiliate Marketing offer. This method sometimes includes spam, cloaking within search engine result pages, or routing users to pages they didn't initially request. One-to-one approach The targeted user is typically browsing the Internet alone therefore the marketing messages can reach them personally. This approach is used in search marketing, where the advertisements are based on search engine keywords entered by the users. And now with the advent of Web 2.0 tools, many users can interconnect as peers. Appeal to specific interests Internet marketing and geo marketing places an emphasis on marketing that appeals to a specific behavior or interest, rather than reaching out to a broadly defined demographic.
  • Book cover image for: Profit from Your Podcast
    eBook - ePub

    Profit from Your Podcast

    Proven Strategies to Turn Listeners into a Livelihood

    • Dave Jackson(Author)
    • 2020(Publication Date)
    • Allworth
      (Publisher)
    7 Affiliate Marketing
    Affiliate Marketing is where you help sell other people’s items. You are given an item (often a unique link or code) that identifies the customer came from you, and you earn a commission for the referral. If you don’t have your own product, you can make more income when you match a product that fits your audience like a glove.
    One note about Affiliate Marketing (and you may notice a pattern here). As Missy Ward wrote in her book Make Money with Your WordPress Blog: Learn How to Monetize Your Blog with Affiliate Marketing , “This is NOT a get rich quick scheme.” Missy is one of the cofounders (along with Shawn Collins) of the Affiliate Summit (the largest affiliate event in the world).
    BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR WORDS
    For me, I feel I’m humble. I’m honored that people listen to my podcast, and I always find it a little “weird” when someone is in an elevator with me and recognizes me but is too nervous to say hello. I’m just a dude who loves helping people podcast.
    I remember talking to a new client, and we were going over the equipment he was going to need. I ask him if he had any. He did. He had more than he needed. When I asked why he bought one piece of equipment when he already owned equipment that did the same thing, he replied, “You said it was cool.” Hearing how he had spent a fair amount of cash was when I realized my words have power. He had spent $600 on equipment he didn’t need. I felt horrible.
    Now when I do gear reviews, I am always sure to point out that if you already have (insert X equipment), you don’t need to buy (insert Y equipment). I don’t want people spending their hard-earned cash on items they don’t need. I am much more specific and clearer on who should and shouldn’t buy the equipment.
    HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS … $1.50 AT A TIME
    I produce a podcast called Logical Weight Loss
  • Book cover image for: KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays
    • Joel Comm(Author)
    • 2010(Publication Date)
    • Wiley
      (Publisher)
    you’ve told them that this is a product they need to own, many of them will click the link, press the shopping cart button, and make a purchase, thus putting money in your pocket.
    That’s the power of a good web site, packed with reliable, quality content. That’s the power that the trust of your users can bring.
    In this chapter, I explain how to make money as an affiliate. I start with a brief description of what being an affiliate means, then discuss how to find merchants and how to sign up for their programs. Finally, I share details of the strategies for success that allow me to enjoy a deafening level of KaChing from the affiliate ads I place on my web sites and deliver to my e-mail subscribers.

    So, What Exactly Is an Affiliate?

    Publishers call themselves affiliates, Amazon calls them associates, and people more used to selling in the offline world tend to use a simpler term: sales rep.
    The offline term is wrong. Amazon’s term is wrong, too, even though the company was one of the first to offer an affiliate program back in 1996. Affiliate systems have developed a lot since then.
    An affiliate isn’t quite a sales rep. Sales reps have no say in the products they sell. Their companies give them a suitcase full of samples and tell them they can keep a share of whatever they earn. They are employees... even if their income depends entirely on their sales skills.
    Affiliates are really entrepreneurs. They choose which products they sell, they build their own markets, and they decide on the best way to persuade people to buy. They also don’t rely on those sales to make money from the market.
    That affiliates are independent business owners in their own right is important. It means that sellers have to treat them with respect—and pay them far more than they might be willing to pay an employee. And it also means that affiliates have to take responsibility. Your earnings as an affiliate will depend to a large extent on the quality of the product you’re selling, but they will also depend on your connection with your market and your ability to lead your readers to buy.
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