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How Affiliate Marketing Skills Let You Hack Any Industry in the World | AWeurope 2017
Affiliate marketing
Is the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person's or company's products. The affiliate simply searches for a product they enjoy, then promotes that product, and earns a piece of the profit from each sale they make.
Affiliate marketing has four core players
the merchant (also known as 'advertiser' or 'retailer' or 'brand')
the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments)
the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate')
the customer
The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates, and specialized third-party vendors.
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 (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing, and (in some sense) display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. The two forms of marketing are differentiated, however, in how they drive sales, where affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations, while referral marketing relies more on trust and personal relationships.
Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in retailers marketing strategies.
The added value of affiliate marketing is the fact that advertisers can collaborate with hundreds of partners, the affiliates, without engaging in direct communication with them. Therefore, the advertisers can increase their market position without a need to conduct time-consuming processes of recurring approvals and relationship building with partners. These tasks are performed by the affiliative system operator, who establishes contact with the advertisers and with the partners and enables advertisers to benefit from the advertising capacity of partners from all around the world. From advertisers' perspective, advertising services are provided by the operator and not by each partner engaged within the affiliation system.
Analogically, the affiliates (partners) are able to provide advertising services without any interaction with advertisers since the affiliate panel gives partners access to all the necessary information needed to run an advertising campaign. Such information includes, for example, advertising materials for each advertised product and service category, geolocation data for individual advertising campaigns for each advertised product and service category, which can be advertised in accordance with its geolocation. Additionally, the affiliate panel includes information about rates per lead generated in a campaign per geolocation. From the perspective of the partners, their services are rendered to the operator and not the advertisers.