Affiliate Marketing
Pay per Performance - as simple as it gets. You (Merchant) only Pay/Reward an affiliate for every visitor, subscriber, sale on your site which came through their effort (website).
Affiliates promotes your site by placing your ads, text links, product links on their web sites, shopping engines, blogs, emails and so on. You only pay an affiliate when a visitor makes a purchase or performs certain predefined actions - register details, sign up to newsletter and so on.
Usually affiliates are paid either a fixed amount or percentage of sale based on the structure of agreement. Affiliate Marketing could be a cheap and effective way of increasing online sales and brand awareness. Communication with your affiliates is the key for successful affiliate program - keep them informed about various promotions, events and peak trading times. This helps them to better promote you.
There are currently no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorization. Some of the popular forms of affiliate marketing are:
Pay Per Sale Affiliate will be paid when each time a visitor makes a successful purchase from the your (merchant's) site. This could involve either a fixed fee per sale, percentage of the sale or a fixed commission every time a particular customer make a purchase.
Pay Per Click Affiliate will be paid when visitors on their site clicks on your ads (say banner ads, textual ads, email or any other form)
Pay Per Lead Affiliate will be paid when visitors registers their details or sign up for their newsletters at your site.
Pursuing Affiliate Marketing You could enter into Affiliate Marketing either by having your In-house Affiliate Program or joining Affiliate Networks.
In-house Affiliate Program
If you are planning to set up your own In-house Affiliate program then you need to - search and recruit affiliates, set up the whole process, need to build or integrate affiliate technology - tracking system and so on, needless to say - It's complex and time consuming process. However you would be dealing directly with the affiliate and avoid the affiliate network's commission.In general In-house Affiliate Programs are suited to large business who have steady flow of traffic to their site and would invest time and money for the technology and marketing of the program, like Amazon.
Affiliate Networks
Affiliate Networks offer a better alternative as they take care of your affiliate program - including the selection of affiliates, the technical aspects - integrating the tracking systems & co. However you would need to pay commission to the Network as an override fee.Affiliate Networks are ideal for companies which have a low budget assigned to technology and marketing of a program.
Some of the well known Affiliate Networks are
Commission Junction
Link Share
Click Bank
PepperJam Network
CX Digital Media
Affiliate Bot
5 Star Affiliate Programs
Share Results
AzoogleAds
Neverblue
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future
MaxBounty
CopeacAs with all forms of marketing you would need to invest time and review your affiliates in order to have success with affiliate marketing.