Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing as we are talking about here is a web-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.
Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies
and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and
in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of
their partners.
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, email
marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of
products or services offered by a partner.
Affiliate marketing — using one site to drive traffic to another — is a form of online
marketing. While search engines, e-mail and RSS 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.
Pros and Cons
Merchants like affiliate marketing because in most cases, it uses a "pay for performance"
model, meaning that the merchant does not incur a marketing expense unless results are accrued (excluding any initial setup cost). Some
businesses owe much of their success to this marketing technique, a notable example being Amazon.com.
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