Ever since heard of people saying something about ‘Affiliate Marketing’ or discussing to refer something that they don’t own but guarantees the quality of that particular thing to encourage you buy it? But why would they do that when they don’t own that thing and, still, they are so convinced about it? OK! This act, they are involved in, is referred to as ‘Affiliate Marketing’ that is one of the most famous kinds of advertising.
Affiliate Marketing: New Way of Advertising
We know advertisement only by a 15 to 30 seconds ad that has some veteran actors and some punch lines that present the product in a different, and perfect, way to convince the viewers that This-Is-The-Best-Product-In-The-World and we are compelled to agree on it. So many companies spend a big amount of their revenue on advertising the product and to keep people aware about their product to generate highest sales and to compete with rival companies to beat their products.
From TVCs to Affiliate Marketing:
In the last decade of 19th century, we saw many new things being started, innovated or initiated (Whatever!) that effected our way of living and one of these things was the invention of World Wide Web or Internet which became a Must-Need-That-Thing kind of necessity for us. With internet, we found different ways to reach anywhere (Virtually!) and those big companies, which were spending money on TVCs (Television Commercials) and banner ads, saw an opportunity to reach straight into the head of end consumer.
But What Is Affiliate Marketing?
When we are visiting a website to learn/read about something, we see different kinds of ad banners alongside the content that are not the part of that website/content but are relevant to what we are doing/reading at the moment. Eventually, some people click on it and few of them purchase the product offered there. When the visitor purchases that product, the website owner (Publisher) from where that visitor reached to the product earns some commission and that’s what we say affiliate marketing.
Important Parties of Affiliate Marketing:
Affiliate marking is a process that involves, at least, 3 important parties to complete its cycle and generate revenue with this process and that are listed below
Advertisers:
The first and the most important party, in affiliate marketing, is called advertiser. (So who’s the advertiser?) The advertiser is a person, group of people or a company that wants to promote a product and is willing to pay good amount of money to anybody who could help them in promotion and generating sales. Advertiser is the starting point of affiliate marketing triangle.
Publishers:
Usually, a publisher is referred as the person who is active user of internet and has a large amount of people in his/her contact list. Normally these people are bloggers and webmasters that run a blog or number of websites on different specific niches to attract people by answering their queries or entertaining them with sarcastic articles about any movie, celebrity or a hot topic.
They place banners somewhere in their websites that is provided by the advertiser that leads the visitor to the advertiser’s website and earn a specific part of the sales by sending visitors (Customers!) forward.
Costumers:
A costumer or visitor is the last, but the most important, part of affiliate marketing triangle as if it is omitted from the equation, the whole cycle would collapse at once. He is the normal guy who searches an answer, tutorial or anything that he needs. In this quest, he reaches to the publisher’s website and notices the banner ads placed alongside the content. If he clicks the ad and then purchases something from advertiser’s website then it is considered as sale and he becomes the customer by doing so.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?![10706413_694132770674185_100084388_n]()
Good question! The formula, on which affiliate marketing works, is quite simple. You may have noticed an option on many websites (Most probably Facebook or Twitter) that says ‘Remember Password’ when logging into your account right? This thing is called a ‘Cookie’ that helps the website’s database to remember the login and password details of every single user.
This cookie (Not Edible BTW!) is used for many other purposes and one of the important purpose for its usage is that it helps the search engine giants to remember what every single user is searching through them. Thus they decide what ads to show to that particular user based on the cookies they have in their computer that is stored after someone clicks on any ad banner.
Do share your opinion about affiliate marketing and provide with useful tips to help your fellow readers to better understand this affiliate marketing concept in the comment section below.
