26/04/2013
Affiliate Marketing
With today’s growing sector of online purchases of both goods and services, the field of advertising has and is gradually shifting toward internet marketing. Internet marketing, unlike most forms of offline marketing, allows for performance-based marketing. Performance-based marketing, where one business, the brand, rewards the affiliate, the publisher, for every visitor or customer brought to the business by the affiliate’s marketing efforts, is called ‘Affiliate Marketing’.
Affiliates are publishers. They use their own websites to generate traffic for brands that they advertise; of-course, before doing so, they negotiate a deal with the brand and agree on the received compensation per customer they generate for the brand. In order to advertise their website and thereby the brands, affiliates most often use classical forms of online marketing such as organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing – ‘pay per click’ (PPC), and email marketing.
The benefits for both sides, the brand and the affiliate, are evident. The brand receives targeted advertising which it pays for based on performance, as opposed to ‘blind’. The affiliate on the other hand, gets directly compensated for the customers he generates for the brand using his marketing skills. The way this works and why, and the benefits are pretty much straight forward, however the world of affiliate marketing and the possibility for an affiliate website to be successful and generate income for the affiliate, goes beyond the technical skills necessary to do the job.
Yes, the affiliate needs to be able to generate traffic for the brand, or else he will not be compensated – this requires experience, skill and a strong technical knowledge of online advertising. The next step, and not a less important one, is the affiliate’s ability to calculate and negotiate the correct deals, where he receives the right amount of compensation for his work.
