Affiliate marketing is a way to make money online by referring sales of products and/or services for a commission.
Affiliate marketers spend their days designing campaigns and strategies for promoting certain products and services. Have you ever wondered why you get so much junk e-mail advertising pharmaceuticals? Those products are in high demand, and affiliate marketers take a commission from each sale they refer.
Not everyone in the affiliate marketing industry is a spammer - pharmaceuticals are just an example that nearly everyone who uses the Internet is familiar with. Many, many products and services are hawked by affiliate marketers. Almost everything you can imagine — if it can be sold, someone will sell it.
How the Game is Played
Some affiliate marketing campaigns are very passive. Web site owners who write about topics concerning products and services will often include their affiliate code in links to e-commerce sites. If you click through and buy something, the publisher gets paid.
Other affiliate marketing campaigns are more aggressive/obvious. These techniques range from operating shopping directories, to buying and soliciting massive e-mail lists, to designing creative rewards programs, to spamming blogs with irrelevant comments containing links to e-commerce sites. Some tactics are simply aggressive, while others are both aggressive and unethical.
Affiliate marketing is closely tied to the search engine optimization industry. One method of marketing products and services is to set up a Web page, or even an entire Web site, dedicated to that product or service. Once the site is online, the marketer will embark on an advertising and promotional campaign to draw in traffic.
The marketer may attempt to get the site ranked highly among natural search engine results to attract visitors. This is done through various word-of-mouth tactics such as message board discussions, blog comments, and e-mail. The goal of these tactics is to draw visitors, and encourage other site owners to link back to the product or service. The latter often results in search engines taking notice.
An affiliate marketer may also purchase advertisements on related sites and search engines. If the marketer is selling computer equipment, it would make sense to advertise on computer Web sites, technology blogs, and search engine results pages for technology-related keywords. As long as the cost of the advertising campaign is less than the payout from the affiliate sales, the marketer will make a profit.
How Affiliates Get Paid
Sites like Amazon.com allow people to become “associates”. Whenever an associate sends a shopper over to Amazon.com, Amazon.com is aware of the referral and notes that an affiliate commission is to be paid if a sale takes place.
Have you ever bought something that was discussed in an Of Zen and Computing product review, or was advertised in our Tech Shop? If so, this Web site took a commission in exchange for referring the sale. This is affiliate marketing at work.
Photo by jenn_jenn.
