What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing has very quickly become one of the most sought after and effective ways to advertise on the Internet.The basics of affiliate marketing is very simple.
A company, let’s say eBay, approaches another web site and asks them to place a banner or link to eBay on their site. Every time a user clicks on that banner and visits the site, the owner of the original site gets a commission. But that isnt the only way it works.
The history of affiliate marketing goes back to approximately 1994 with the groundbreaking music website www.CDNow.com. They were, as far as most people know, the first website to pay other sites for directing Internet traffic to them. The Internet giant Amazon.com caught on soon after and became the site first and foremost associated with affiliate marketing. Today, the practice of affiliate marketing is used by most every major web site in the world.
| Why affiliate marketing? One of the larger reasons that affiliate marketing has proven to be so popular is that it is completely based on performance so in most cases, the company doing the advertising doesn’t pay anything 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 also 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 even if they did, that they even knew what it was in the first place.
Other methods of affiliate marketing include things like 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 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 and efficient 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 very dominant advertising method well into the future.
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