Affiliate marketing is a category of performance-based marketing in which a business/corporation rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought in by the affiliates own marketing strategy. The trade has four key players: the merchant (also known as ‚retailer‘ or ‚brand‘), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publishers (also known as ‚the affiliate‘), and the customer.

To the Merchant: Affiliate marketing offers the merchant a wider place to sell their product and services. More websites will naturally provide you more customers and will create more sales. This is particularly true if the sites that you have chosen are in their niche marketing.

Affiliate marketing intersects with other Internet marketing procedures to some level, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay per Click), e-mail marketing, and, in some sense, display advertising. At the other spectrum of things, affiliates sometimes use less conventional procedures, such as producing fake reviews of products or services which are offered by a partner.

There are some merchants who attract new affiliates by promising high commissions then after a week or two, they dramatically drop those commission rates. Aside from that, when hijackers interfere, affiliates typically don’t get just commission, it goes to the hijacker instead.

Above all, the affiliate can have extra income from his or her website without investing something in making his own product and without worrying about customer support, book keeping, and ecommerce. Here in affiliate marketing, the merchant handles it all. The affiliate just needs to promote and resell the product.

To the Customers: The benefit that a customer could get out of affiliate marketing is obvious they get an answer to their problem that they may not have found without the help of the affiliate’s website. That’s if, and only if the merchandise or service gives what it says it will. All-in-all there are many positives in implementing the affiliate marketing strategy and using it would benefit any business considerably.

Williams Commerce is an seo agency that also provides ecommerce solutions to the B2B and B2C markets.