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Is Affiliate Marketing For You?

Long before the internet was born, the idea of money sharing has been floated about and has appeared in one form or another through the years. However, the idea has been taken to new levels thanks to affiliate marketing, which has become a staple form of advertising and bringing in business for all kinds of e-commerce ventures.

What is affiliate marketing?

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing promotes online businesses by using affiliate programs as advertising and paying commissions to publishers or “affiliates”, based mostly on the amount of business they bring to the merchant. This kind of advertising is commission-based and is a kind of revenue-sharing. The term “affiliate marketing” is also often related to internet marketing or multilevel marketing, as well.

Basically, affiliate marketing is the most inexpensive kind of selling there is and is actually incredibly efficient. For this reason, many firms (particularly those that started since the early days of e-commerce) owe an incredible amount to affiliate marketing (amazon.com is an excellent example), and it has become standard for firms to incorporate affiliate marketing in many of their business plans.

There are three types of compensation methods that are related to affiliate marketing. First, there is CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per mil). Fundamentally, the affiliate earns by how many clicks the advertising on his/her site generates or by just having the advert published on the website. CPC is not generally used for affiliate marketing and now either use CPA (Cost per Action) or CPS (Cost per Sale). The former relies on the number of folks performing an action generated by the ad (such as registration), while the latter relies on the amount of sales generated. In other words, an affiliate is paid if the clicker successfully purchases something on the publicized site.

Is affiliate marketing the same as multilevel marketing?

As the most cost-effective and efficient method of advertising today, affiliate marketing works very well as a form of internet advertising and money share. Fundamentally, a company displays advertisements on a domain and the webmaster is paid either by the number of clicks it receives or by the amount of sales generated by the advertisement. Usually, the latter is the preferred kind of affiliate marketing, presenting almost no risk in the slightest for the company wishing to sell its services/product and the affiliate.

Although many firms don’t use online network marketing methods, multilevel marketing (MLM) and affiliate marketing should not be confused. Affiliate marketing works differently, though, in the sense that the website owner himself (the affiliate) earns earnings and doesn’t sign up or register anyone for the program himself. Both forms can produce a huge revenue for both parties, but MLM is a completely different subject.

What are its advantages?

There are some benefits and disadvantages to affiliate marketing, but the majority of the benefits weigh out the disadvantages. Web merchants find affiliate marketing highly beneficial due to the fact that it presents almost no risk both for the merchant and the affiliate. The way it works is that the affiliate earns a kind of commission or a fixed amount based on the amount of sales he/she brings to the merchant, either through on-line links on the affiliate’s website or through email newsletters, blogs, RSS feeds, social and other means of online communication. About one percent of folks that use affiliate promotion use the CPC system, which means that the affiliate earns a commission every time the merchant’s advertisement is clicked. Again, this type of compensation isn’t preferred as it’s too dodgy for merchants, thanks to deceptive people taking advantage of the system.

The program’s only real drawback is the presence of bad methods that include false advertising, adware, “spamdexing” (websites consisting only of advertising with no real content), or spam. These often just link to useless sites or produce pop-ups. But thanks to the rise of blogs, these kinds of issues are getting less.

Affiliate marketing also doesn’t cost the merchant anything to place banners on affiliates’ sites, so they just pay if a sale or even just a lead is generated. Merchants also get to set the parameters and decide on the inducement schemes. Therefore, it is a terribly cheap but very efficient way to cultivate a business.

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