what is affiliate marketing

THE CONCEPT OF AFFILIATEMARKETING
Welcome to the money making world of Affiliate Marketing…
What is Affiliate Marketing and who are Affiliates? There are various
Companies which form time to do various sales or brand promotion on
INTERNET. Promotion can be anything like a campaign to build a brand, a
campaign to promote sales, or let’s say a campaign to make people aware of its
services. Now Internet is a diversified field with no single mode of promotion as
we have in traditional world like newspaper or television, hence the way to
promote these brands or products is a little different on the net. Moreover one
can not expect a company to recruit thousands of people to promote its
campaigns over millions of websites on the net and pay huge bills in terms of
manpower cost and operational overheads. It is here that people like you and us
comes into picture.
We are termed as Affiliates / Publishers and the companies are Merchants or
Advertiser.
What is our role? We are people looking out for some online work opportunities;
it might be part time or full time. But unfortunately, we don’t owe a product or
concept which can sell online and even if we have a product, we don’t have a
platform or market where we can promote our product. So how do we proceed
now? Remember, what we said in the previous passage? Merchants have a
product but the need people to promote it. We are the people but we don’t have
the product and platform. Here comes the association. These Merchants offers us
a Performance based Incentive Program, wherein we can take their brands and
product campaigns for free of charge, ad get paid against the promotion we do
not behalf of these merchants. Remember when we are saying, take their brand
or product, it NEVER means any type of physical goods or products that we
have to take or buy from Merchants.
We, the affiliates (or publishers) were looking out for product to promote and the
platform to promote. Now we have the product in terms of Online Campaigns
from various Merchants But still we are missing out on the Platform, Let’s
understand it in this way. Let’s say you have the best quality product which can
give you a very good profit, but what if you don’t have a shop or outlet to sell it?
How people will come to know about it? Same is the scene in online market. You
have taken the product from Merchant, but still you don’t know how to promote
it and more imp where to promote it. Here comes the role of Google.com, which
offers you and effective platform to promote the product on be half of Merchants.
Similar platforms can be email campaign, a newsletter, or any website where
traffic is good.
So to conclude, Affiliate Marketing effectively means we get paid when a
desired activity (as desired by Merchant) like sale happens form the links or
banners (provided by Merchants) placed by us in email campaign, newsletter,
website or pay click search engine like Google or Yahoo.
The Major Question-Who keeps the Tracking of all this work and commission
Generally Merchants do not track their affiliates work and commissions and
therefore they outsource their work to a third party termed as APP (Affiliate
Program Provider). APP works as a bridge between advertiser website ad
affiliates. They collect the payment from the merchants and pay to affiliates i.e.
us for their work.
It means that we are working for the merchants / websites through the APP and
they take care of everything, right from tracking and reporting of our work to
sending payment to us. From APP, we can get the promotional campaigns for
merchants in form of text and banner links. The banners or links now can be
effectively used in various types of campaigns like promotion via emails, via
website or through pay per click search engine like Google, Yahoo. When
someone clicks on the link placed by us, they are directed to some specified
webpage of the advertiser’s site. When they fulfill the criteria like signup or
purchase something we get paid. The APP does all the work.
· One can see all the transaction report in the APP site
· APPs do not charge anything for joining.
· It depends on them whether they accept your application or not. The top 3
APPs are Commission Junction (CJ), Cickbank and Linkshare. You can also check
out clixgalore
We will explain you things by taking example of www.cj.com i.e. Commission
Junction, CJ is the biggest APP on Internet and its tracking is excellent. CJ tracks
billions of impressions each month and have clients like Baazee (eBay.in),
Monster, and Screensvers.com. CJ sends monthly commission checks or deposits
your commission directly in your bank account. CJ sends only checks to Indians
affiliates.