Affiliate programs – What is it?

Affiliate programs started in 1996. Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, explained this idea as an Internet marketing strategy.
Amazon attracts affiliates to post links to books for sale on Amazon by promising them a percentage of the profits if someone clicks on the link and purchases books.
The affiliate helps make the sale, but Amazon does everything else: They take the order, collect the money and ship the book to the customer.

Over the past few years affiliate programs have grown enormously in popularity, taking many interesting forms. For many Web sites that don't deal much in e-commerce (selling products or services online) themselves, functioning as an affiliate is a good way to participate in e-commerce.

How it’s work? These affiliate Web sites post links or banners to the merchant site and are paid according to a particular agreement between the website and the advertiser. This agreement is usually based on the number of people the affiliate sends to the merchant's site, or the number of people they send who buy something or perform other action such as filling a lead form. Some arrangements pay according to the number of people who visit the page containing their merchant site's banner advertisement.

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, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Payment

There are three major types of payment arrangements:

Pay-per-sale: The merchant site pays an affiliate when the affiliate sends them a customer who purchases something. Some merchant Web sites, like Amazon.com, pay the affiliate a percentage of the sale and others pay a fixed amount per sale.

Pay-per-click: The merchant site pays the affiliate based on the number of visitors who click on the link to come to the merchant's site. They don't have to buy anything, and it doesn't matter to the affiliate what a visitor does once he gets to the merchant's site.

Pay-per-lead: a with these programs pay their affiliates based on the number of visitors they refer who sign up as leads. This simply ameans the visitor fills out some requested information at the merchant site, which the merchant site may use as a sales lead or sell to another company as a sales lead.

Epilogue

Affiliate programs work best when affiliates choose products and services that match the content of their site. If a content the website owner chooses affiliate programs well, everybody involved in the process benefits, including the customer. The customer wins because the affiliate Web site directs her to products she would be interested in.

I began with Amazon and I will finish with Amazaon. Watch this video and learn how Andrew made $11,000 from amazon's affiliate program.

You joined an affiliate program. Here are the 18 steps to take next

Idan Factor, Marketing Manager

Thanks to Makeitdigi for digitzing photos