What is Affiliate Marketing & How Does It Work?

The first term that sounds familiar when we think about affiliate marketing is “MARKETING“. Basically the Term Marketing is used to define the process of promoting the products of a company or an organization by using advertisements. But when we look at the Digital aspect of MARKETING one of the practice is termed as “AFFILIATE MARKETING.”

So Affiliate Marketing is the Platform where an individual or organization promotes the products of other person or company on their websites, blogs etc. and based on the performance, affiliates get paid commissions for the successful action/sale.

Some Elements of Affiliate Marketing are:

• MERCHANT or ADVERTISER: Merchant in Affiliate Marketing represents the Brand, Person or Company having Products which they want to promote online.
• AFFILIATE or PUBLISHER: AFFILIATE or PUBLISHERS are individuals having any medium to publish and promote the Merchant’s products for commissions on leads or sales. Affiliates uses Mediums like Blogs, Websites, social media etc.
• AFFILIATE NETWORK: An Affiliate network acts as an intermediate between AFFILIATES and MERCHANTS. Affiliate network consists of a group of Affiliates and Merchants. Affiliate Network is in Contact with both the parties, Merchants connect with the Network to offer affiliate programs or campaigns and Affiliate joins the network to promote the products of the Merchants. So, by using Affiliate network Merchants can target a larger audience by promoting the campaigns to the publishers participating in Affiliate Network.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing:

• Reduced Time and Efforts: Affiliate Marketing Reduces Merchant’s time and efforts consumed to search for customers. Merchants only need to connect to Affiliate network which have large affiliate base. Thus, Merchants can increase their sales.
• Low cost Setup: No size-able investment needs to be made to setup an Affiliate Program.
• Added Benefits: Provides tools and mechanism to track campaign progress for both Merchants and Affiliates. Affiliates can track how much traffic they are sending to the promoted content and Merchants can track the growth in their sales after the campaign launch.
• Performance Based: It is Performance based that means merchants need to pay commissions only for successful sales.
• Monetize Traffic: Affiliate Marketing enables publishers to maximize their Website’s or Blog’s earning potential by monetizing the traffic. The Affiliate can earn money by promoting other’s products.