Affiliate Marketing and its importance

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an online sales tactic that lets a product owner increase sales by allowing others targeting the same audience—“affiliates”—to earn a commission by recommending the product to others. At the same time, it makes it possible for affiliates to earn money on product sales without creating products of their own.

Affiliate Marketing is a type of marketing practice where the affiliates recruit sub-affiliates and earn some fixed percentage on the sale happened through sub-affiliates by using the unique referral ID or link provided to the sub-affiliates. The sub-affiliates, in turn, can recruit another level of sub-affiliates to earn a similar commission. This goes on like a chain process in Affiliate Marketing.

How it works?

To participate in an affiliate marketing program, you’ll need to take these five simple steps:
• Join an affiliate program.
• Pick a product to promote.
• Obtain a unique affiliate link for each offer and share those links on your blog, social media, or websites.
• When someone makes a purchase, you earn a handsome affiliate commission.

Benefits of the Affiliate Marketing

• The main advantage of having an affiliate program is that it is entirely performance-based. Because affiliates are only paid a commission once the desired action has taken place, they’re more motivated to drive the conversion you’re looking for. This mitigates any efforts that drive traffic with little to no value to your company while also ensuring that you get what you pay for.

• Affiliates can be found in every market and product category that exists today. Whether you’re looking to break into the retail industry or for something more niche like handcrafted vintage toys, there will always be relevant websites to align with. The great news is that many of these affiliates will already have an established visitor base.

• Merchants gain a wider place to sell their products and services, resulting in more customers and more sales.

• Programs that track compile statistics from affiliate sites provide reliable and current client behavior on trends and demands at no extra cost.

• The affiliate does not have to worry about customer support, book keeping, and e-commerce related headaches since in affiliate marketing, the merchant handles it all; all the affiliate needs to do is promote and resell the product.

• An affiliate marketer can still maintain his present work or business and have the affiliate marketing income to supplement his financial position. With a laptop and an internet connection, anybody can work almost anywhere even while enjoying a vacation.

• For many of the reasons listed above, affiliate marketing can be extremely cost effective. If you’re only paying commissions when the desired conversion occurs, you’re not throwing away ad dollars on placements that have no proven value.

• For clients, they do not have to drive all the way to the merchant’s store or retailer to physically buy the product or engage the services of a service provider.

• The affiliate marketing program provides an easy way to create additional sources of income for website publishers and owners. Marketing banners of merchant’s products generate instant sales wherein they get a commission.