What is Affiliate?

An affiliate is a marketing partner who promotes your
products or services for a commission. Affiliate marketing
is very popular these days to promote products and services.

Affiliate Marketing is a revenue sharing venture between
a website owner and an online merchant. The website owner
will place advertisements on his websites to either help
sell the merchant's products or to send potential customers
to the merchant's website, all in exchange for a share of
the profits.

There are three ways to earn money through affiliate marketing:

Pay Per Click — Every time a potential customer leaves
the affiliate website by "clicking" on the link leading
to the merchant's website, a certain amount of money is
deposited in the affiliate's account. This amount can
be pennies or dollars depending on the product and
amount of the commission.

Pay Per Sale — Every time a sale is made as a result
of advertising on the affiliate's website, a percentage,
or commission, is deposited into the affiliate's account.

Pay Per Lead — Every time a potential client registers
at the merchant's website as a result of the
advertisement on the affiliate's account, a previously
determined amount is deposited into the affiliate's account.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry
where a number of different types of companies and
individuals are performing this form of internet marketing,
including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies
and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors,
and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the
products and services of their partners.

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.

Affiliate marketing — using one site to drive traffic
to another — is a form of online marketing, which is
frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search
engines, e-mail and RSS capture much of the attention
of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a
much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to
play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.