What exactly is Affiliate Marketing?

If you are new to internet marketing, or simply haven’t heard about affiliate marketing yet, here is a short intro about what it is…

Simply put, affiliate marketing is marketing others’  products for sale, whether they’re physical products, digital products available for download, or even promoting various offers where the expected result is the capture of a lead.

The affiliate marketer uses various marketing methods to drive traffic to an offer / product with the intention of converting the visitor into a “customer”. That is what we call a conversion.

Before someone can promote an offer, he/she has to apply or sign up with the merchant or through an affiliate network, in order to become an approved affiliate of that merchant or network.

Once approved, the affiliate selects an offer to promote based on his own selection criteria, then sets up one or several campaigns to promote the offer. It could be a Pay Per Click campaign (like Google Adwords), or it could be an email marketing campaign, or both, or any other (online) marketing technique that is allowed for this offer.

This might be a too broad generalization, but having success in affiliate marketing usually involves:

• generating targeted quality traffic through the right marketing channels
• quickly testing multiple campaigns to weed out not converting offers
• optimizing converting campaigns by minimizing their costs and increase the conversions
• ramping up the converting campaigns by scaling them up
• go through the process again for new offers

We will publish more information on various online marketing methods in further posts… so stay tuned.