What is Affiliate Marketing?


Photo credit: EpSos

Have you ever heard of Affiliate Marketing? It is becoming increasingly popular. Affiliate marketing is one way that some businesses and individuals are monetizing their website.

Affiliate marketing is when a business rewards website owners for revenue generated from a visit sent from the affiliate. For example, if you are writing a blog posts about tomato seeds and add a link in the post to xyzseeds.com. If you have an affiliate account set up with them and someone who goes from your blog to xwyseeds.com and purchases something, you get rewarded for that. That reward can be with credit to xyzseeds.com or a percentage of the money your reader paid. Most affiliate programs pay for an actual sale on their site but a few pay per visit or pay per lead.

As you know, from reading this blog, inbound links to your site are good. Search engines love it when other sites point to your site. It helps them organize who does what and who is an authority in which space.

Affiliate marketing is still pretty new online and increasingly in popularity, especially since their is little to no cost put on the merchant site. Probably the best known affiliate program is with Amazon.

Should you be using an Affiliate Program?

If you are considering an affiliate program (to participate as an affiliate or merchant), you should do your homework. See what opportunities are there, who in your industry is already using it and how it is received by your customers. Some readers may feel cheated by not knowing you have an affiliate program running. Try to take the pulse of what your readers or customers are comfortable with.

If you want to look into an affiliate program you can try looking on a few Affiliate Directories.

Affiliate marketing isn’t for everyone but it can be good for particular businesses and industries. Do you know anyone in your industry who is trying it? How is it working for them?

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