What is affiliate marketing?
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What is affiliate marketing?
AFFILIATE MARKETING has quickly become one of the most popular and
the most effective ways to advertise on the Internet. The premise of
affiliate marketing is very simple.
A company, let's say eBay, goes to another web site and asks them to
place a banner or link to eBay on their site. Every time a user clicks
on that eBay banner and visits the site, the owner of the original
site gets a commission. It's as simple as that.
The history of affiliate marketing goes back to approximately 1994
with the trailblazing music website . They were, as far as most people
know, the first site to pay other sites for directing Internet traffic
to them. Internet giant Amazon.com soon caught on and became the site
most associated with affiliate marketing. Today, the practice of
affiliate marketing is used by essentially every major web site in the
world.
WHY AFFILIATE MARKETING?
One of the reasons that affiliate marketing has proven to be so
popular is that it is completely based on performance. In most cases,
the company doing the advertising doesn't pay a single penny to the
site that is carrying their ad unless there is evidence that Internet
traffic has been driven to the advertising site. There are, however,
other ways of doing affiliate marketing.
Some advertising sites have paid the site hosting their link based
not on the number of times an original IP visits through the link, but
on the number of times the banner ad was "seen." This method presents
a whole host of problems since things like hit counts can be forged
and there is no way to insure that just because someone visited a web
page that had your logo on it that they even saw it or if they did,
that they even knew what it was.
Other methods of affiliate marketing include paying only when a link
is followed AND some kind of transaction takes place. This can be
tough on the site hosting the link because the attention span of the
average Internet user isn't long enough in most cases to follow a link
and then either complete a purchase, or fill out a form of some kind.
The conventional method simply pays a host a commission for every time
an original IP is directed to their site.
In a matter of only a few years, affiliate marketing has become one
of the most cost effective ways to drive traffic to a site. Since, in
most cases, both the advertiser and the host profit from the set up,
there is no reason to believe that affiliate marketing won't be a
dominant advertising method well into the future.
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