Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.

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 utilize a number of different methods to advertise the products and services of their merchant/advertiser partners.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates are using the same methods as most of the merchants themselves do. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and to some degree display advertising.

Affiliate marketing - using one site to drive traffic to another - is the stepchild of online marketing. While search engines, e-mail and RSS capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing, despite lineage that goes back almost to the beginning of online retailing, carries a much lower profile. Yet affiliates continue to play a fundamental role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.

An Affiliate network is a value-added online media intermediary, providing services including aggregation, distribution of creative materials, and campaign performance tracking/reporting, for affiliate merchants and affiliates.

For affiliate merchants, services can include providing tracking technology, reporting tools, payment processing, and access to a large base of affiliates. For affiliates, services can include providing one-click application to new merchants, reporting tools, and payment aggregation.

The networks are free to join but can be hard to find. They sometimes call themselves names like "marketing solutions provider", "pay-for-performance network", "cost-per-action advertising network", or even "performance-based online marketing services company". They can provide pay-per-lead (PPL), pay-per-sale (PPS), pay-per-action (PPA) – sometimes called cost per action (CPA) – and pay-per-click (PPC) offers from merchants that you promote on your web site or in your newsletter.

Some affiliate networks allow almost anyone to join. Others insist your site must receive a certain number of visitors. Some also let you see a directory of the merchants in the network before you join, whereas others show you their list of offers only after you join.

Affiliate program directories are niche web directories that are very like the large and broad web directories like the Yahoo! Directory or Dmoz, also known as ODP or Open Directory Project. Web directories are like the Yellow pages in the offline world, listings of sites grouped by niche, geographic location or special characteristic or property

Types of Publisher (Affiliate) Websites are often categorized by merchants (Advertisers) and Affiliate networks. The main categories are:
-Search affiliates that utilize Pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers offers (Search arbitrage)
-Comparison shopping sites and directories
-Loyalty sites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back or charitable donations
-Coupon and rebate sites that focus on Sales promotions
-Content and niche sites, including product review sites
-Personal websites (these type of sites were the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing, but are today almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate sites)
-Blogs and RSS Feeds
-Email list affiliates (Owners of large opt-in email list)
-Registration Path affiliates that include offers from other companies during a registration process on their own website.
-Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparison and other features based on information that frequently change and require ongoing updates.
-CPA Networks are top tier affiliates that expose offers from advertiser they are affiliated with to their own network of affiliates (not to confuse with 2nd tier)