Affiliate marketing is an accountable form of modern day, online advertising strategy that establishes a relationship between three parties – advertiser, publisher and consumer.

Advertiser: Advertiser is typically an organization, firm or a retailer that wants to sell its products or services. It’s an organization that is willing to pay other firms or people who can help it sell it products or promote its brand among the target audience.

Publisher: Publisher is a company or in rare cases an individual who owns a website and is ready to promote the advertiser’s products or services in return for a commission. Publisher incorporates link, banner ads or text ads in order to promote advertiser’s brand. A publisher may also be referred as an Affiliate.

Consumer: Consumer is the person who is responsible to see the ad and then take an action accordingly like clicking on the ad or link. The action of consumer will get leads or conversion for the advertiser.

Affiliate Marketing in Short
Affiliate marketing is typically a performance-based internet marketing strategy in which a business (advertiser) rewards affiliates (publishers) for each customer brought by affiliate’s very own marketing efforts.

Types of Affiliate Programs
Advertisers tie up with publishers to get more sales and leads for their business. Here the advertisers are required to pay to the publishers only for the conversions they get through publisher’s marketing efforts like placing link or ad related to the advertiser’s business in their website. There are different types of affiliate programs which the advertisers can implement to pay out to the publishers.

PPC (Pay Per Click): In PPC program, advertiser pays publisher for every click they get through their ad placed on publisher’s website.

(PPL) Pay Per Lead: Here the advertiser admits into paying a fixed amount to the publisher that gets users for execution of tasks like short survey, free trial, install, sign up, online form submission etc., related to the advertiser’s business.

Pay Per Sale (PPS): Here the advertiser enters into commitment with publisher to pay a percentage of all qualified sales.

Implementation of Affiliate Marketing Strategy
If you want to promote your business and are willing to implement the affiliate marketing strategy, then you will initially require finding out an appropriate publisher who can publish your ads (which can be in form of banners, text or links) in their website. There are ad networks that can help you find the relevant publishers for your advertising needs. Once you have found an appropriate publisher to post your marketing ads you can just enter into an affiliate program with it. Better select a good publisher or a well-established company that has the same target audience as yours. The publisher or affiliate then will use a link to mention your business on their website. As soon as a customer who visits affiliate’s website clicks on the affiliate link, he will directed to your business website. On doing so, a cookie will be dropped in the customer’s PC which you will be able to check as soon as the customer completes the checkout process after purchase.  Now you will find a cookie that belongs to affiliate and hence, log a credit for sale commission to be given to the publisher as per agreement. At the end, you can show your affiliate the report made by you about the sales you got through them and hence make a payment accordingly.

This strategy of affiliate marketing benefits both advertisers and publishers equally because here advertisers are getting leads and better sales for their investments, while the publishers are able to sell their marketing efforts for a cost and hence are able to earn a good income.

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