Affiliate Marketing

What is Affiliate Marketing? 

Affiliate Marketing is sometimes also called Advertising, Performance Marketing, Partner Marketing, CPA, or Associate Program. In an affiliate marketing program, a publisher/affiliate receives a commission for generating a transaction, such as a lead or sale, for an advertiser that the publisher is promoting. The advertiser provides its ads or links to publishers and assigns a commission for each action it wants to accomplish.

Whats is a Publisher/Affiliate? 

Publisher, also known as an affiliate or reseller, is an independent party that promotes products and services of an advertiser in exchange for a commission on leads or sales. A publisher displays an advertiser’s ads, text links, or product links on their Web site, in e-mail campaigns, or in search listings.

The publisher is paid a commission by the respective advertiser when a visitor takes a specific action such as filling out a form, subscribing to a service (both lead examples) or making a purchase (a sale).

Publishers place the tracking code for these ads on their Web sites, in their email campaigns, or in search listings. Whenever a visitor uses these links to go to the advertiser site and generate an action on the advertiser site, that transaction is tracked online. If a product or service is purchased, the customer pays the advertiser directly, and the publisher is paid a commission for that transaction. The commission is your money!

Where do Publisher/Affiliates look for Advertisers or Merchants

To look for advertisers of Merchants whom you can help advertise and earn money in the form of commissions, you can look for them through the following means.

1. You can look for them online in google buy just typing in affiliate programs of certain niche. For example, you can type in “shoes affiliate programs”. or you can just look for random shopping merchant stores online who have affiliate programs for you to join.
2. Some merchant stores or advertisers however rely on a third party affiliate program network. this network generally act like a center medium that deals with interaction between advertiser and publisher. The various merchant stores/advertisers will provide their links/ads and etc through the third party network. The publishers will then join the network, and help promote products of merchants/advertisers who have joined the network. The publisher’s job is to sign up for affiliate/publisher account in the affiliate network and look for all the various stores/advertisers who have also joined. Look for the most appropriate products/niche that suit your website and help promote them. With any lead/sale/action etc, you will earn money in the form of commission from the advertisers. And what’s best is that the tracking of sales will be done by the third party affiliate network.

I personally will recommend signing up for affiliate networks. This makes tracking yor sales very easy since you only need to sign in into one account to see all sales/lead you have made for the various merchants/advertisers, just through one central affiliate network account.

Click on Affiliate Network under Category to browse the top 5 affiliate networks.