Understanding Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.
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 (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC - Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. However, both are distinct forms of marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales.
Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication 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

What Should an Affiliate Marketing Company Provide?

Good affiliate marketing companies are free to sign up for. They provide codes for advertisement links and the cookie tracking capabilities for affiliates to earn the money they deserve. Other services an affiliate marketing company should provide include:

Features
Features are a fundamental key to success for all parties involved in affiliate marketing. Features provide the key elements that create links for advertisements, provide tracking capabilities and offer the selection of advertisers needed to make an advertisement relevant to its traffic. Many service companies are always working to create more functional and easy to use feature that will increase sales and commissions.

Reporting Features
To understand what is working towards your benefit and what is holding you back, affiliate marketing services have created reporting options where users are able to track advertisement effectiveness. Reporting options include not only traffic for specific ads, but also the money you have earned and where it has been generated from. Report content, time frame and format are often large factors for large businesses when choosing a service provider.

Ease of Use
Companies and services need to provide their users with ease-of-use and smooth navigation. Internet users have been trained to expect the tools and services they require to be at their fingertips at any given point in time. Search options, tabs and links all help to create a usable service. We have tested the usability of these websites and found what makes them easy to use and keeps their affiliates coming back again and again.

Search Options
Finding the products you are looking to promote should be quick and easy. Many companies now offer advanced searches that allow users to search in a number of ways. Instead of just searching for products or advertisers, many users also appreciate the search options that allow them to search by commission price, creating more opportunities for them to up raise their commissions in a short time.

Help and Support
No service or company is ever complete without a great customer help and support program. Top companies will provide guides for new users, step-by-step tutorials and customer representatives who are able to help you with your account questions and concerns. Many companies are moving away from offering customer support over the telephone and only offering online help. We feel that options are still important and that the user needs to feel like they are taken care of, otherwise they stop using the service.

Search for:

Commission Junction

Click Bank

Amazon

They offer great affiliate program.

For more help leave your comment.

To your online success