Affiliate Marketing! A very trendy word! But many are unaware of its meaning. The word has lots of variations of meanings. When looked for it on Google, got following as in result,
- To adopt or accept as a member, subordinate associate, or branch: The HMO affiliated the clinics last year.
- To associate (oneself) as a subordinate, subsidiary, employee, or member: affiliated herself with a new law firm.
- To assign the origin of. (Courtesy: Answers.com)
Out of which i think the first one can relate to what we are looking for. After all it's all about getting associated. Basically, affiliate marketing is based on a mutual relationship between an advertiser and a publisher. You will come across many definitions of affiliate marketing, too. Let's see what they say,
Affiliate Marketing - this is a profit sharing arrangement between a online merchant and an online affiliate marketer. The affiliate marketers site features the merchants products or services with a unique ID link to the merchants site. Each sale/ lead etc from the affiliate marketer site earns commission from the merchant.
( http://www.affiliatemarketingbasics.com/jargon.html)
But this all can be Greek and Latin to people who are new to this field or who don't have any knowledge of commerce. Let's try to simplify this. Imagine a company which sells shoes online. Let's call it as
'A'. Let's say it has a website as www.a.com. Assuming A as a quite established brand in its field but still is looking for more exposure in the market. So it will try different ways of marketing, including the traditional ways like banner ads, TV commercials, radio jingles,etc. but it doesn't have that much brand equity online. So, looking for an online exposure, and that too, a quality one! And there's this company which is knows as www.b.com So B has a quality number of viewers online and mainly deals with selling or providing info online. B also makes money by letting other advertise on its portal. A quite an easy way of working! It has a mode of earning with both
CPA and
PPC. But as for now A and B do not know each other. They can fulfill each other's needs. So they both approach an
affiliate network C, where finally they meet each other and exchange each other's details. Possibly, B, who is a publisher would likely to approach A, as A is quite a big brand. So they finally settle down on a revenue of 5% per sale. So B starts publishing ads provided by A, and not to forget they have paid an applicable charge to the network where they have met.
So, this is one way an affiliate marketing campaign comes to realization.
Here, A is known as merchant/advertiser.
B is a an affiliate/publisher and C is an affiliate network. So these three are known as 3 layers in an affiliate domain.
That's all folks...for today
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