What is affiliate marketing

1) What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing where you promote someone else’s product and you get a commission on the sale. You don’t need to buy the product, stock it or provide any after sales support.

2) How does affiliate marketing work?

        * You join an affiliate network.
 

* You pick up an offer that you would like to promote. It could be any online product or service. It can be referring people to fill a form on a dating website (like shaadi.com), or recommending them an online store to buy t-shirts from. There are thousands of such offers to promote across the globe.

* Once you choose an offer to promote, you will be provided with a unique link to that offer. You will be able to use this link to promote the selected offer. You do not need to know the technical details to special software, since it is included by default in the affiliate program.

 *When anyone visits the offer through your unique link and completes the desired action like filling a form or buying something you will be paid a commission.Your commissions will keep accumulating in the affiliate network you have joined. You can get paid from the affiliate networks on a weekly or monthly basis.

*   Affiliate (i.e. you) signs up for the merchant’s or advertiser’s affiliate program.

In the later chapters you will be introduced to a few recommended affiliate programs which you can join. When you will join an affiliate program, for every product there you’ll get your unique affiliate link. You’ll have your own login details to login inside the affiliate program where you will be able to track and see your performance.

*  Affiliate uses an affiliate link whenever they mention the merchant on their website.You can promote affiliate links not only through your website, but also through your blog, through YouTube videos through Facebook and other social networks through email and other methods.

* Vijay for example a normal online surfer visits an Affiliate’s website.When you’ll start marketing your website or promote your affiliate link in other ways you’ll keep getting visitors. Vijay clicks on your affiliate link to visit merchant’s website.When you’ll start getting visitors with whatever online marketing you’re doing, many of those visitors (not all of them), will click on your affiliate link to reach the merchant’s website.

§   A cookie gets dropped to Vijay’s computer

When visitors click on the affiliate link, a cookie gets dropped in their web browser. This cookie will help the advertiser to identify that Vijay came through your affiliate link.
Note: This is the technology of the affiliate program you have joined. You don’t have to do anything here, but it is important to know the basics of how the visitors are tracked online. Vijay completes the desired action on the merchant’s website.

The desired action could be filling a form, buying something, entering his email or whatever the advertiser wanted him to do. Once the visitor completes the desired action, we say that the visitor has converted and a conversion has taken place.After completing the desired action, merchant checks for the affiliate cookie on Vijay’s computer.

§ Merchant finds a cookie belonging to you and logs a credit for the commission according to the affiliate agreement.
   Merchant makes reports available that show the affiliate all the visitors and sales or conversions from the affiliate link.You can check these reports on the affiliate program after logging in. Everything is well organised there. At the end of every payment period, affiliate program sends the payment to the affiliate for all the conversions or sales in that period. Usually a payment period is one month. This is how affiliate marketing actually works.