The term “affiliate” refers to an individual or group that is officially attached to a larger organization. Online, the term affiliate marketing means the act of an independent individual or party that drives traffic to an online store and gets paid only for realized sales.
Affiliate Marketing in Practice
A business that sales products or services online can take on affiliate marketing partners who drive traffic to the store. Whenever a customer directed to the site by the affiliate marketer makes a purchase, the marketer receives a commission from the seller.
Affiliate marketing is dependent on what are known as affiliate links. The marketing partner uses specific, individual affiliate links to drive traffic to the store, for instance in blog posts or on forums. With these links, it is possible for the seller to see which customers have come to the store through an affiliate marketer. This way, commissions can be paid according to agreements.
The affiliate links are formed and monitored by a digital program. Once the program has been set up, using it is generally easy enough that both the store owner and the affiliate marketer can use it successfully even without outstanding IT skills.
The Best Affiliate Marketers Reach Large Amounts of Potential Customers
Being an affiliate marketer can be a full-time job through which one can make a living. For instance, many professional bloggers are affiliate marketers who use their blogs to drive traffic to different online stores.
Affiliate marketing is a good option whenever one party has an online store and the other one has an online channel that reaches large amounts of potential customers. The channel may be a website, a blog, a social media channel or anything where driving digital traffic to the store is possible.
The Advantages of Affiliate Marketing
Both the seller and the marketer benefit from affiliate marketing.
- Sales in the online store go up
- The seller can spend less time on marketing
- Easy way for affiliate marketers to make money
- A lot of data about customer behavior is collected
- Neither the store nor the marketer need to make large monetary investments
Affiliate marketing is at its strongest when it is a partnership between the manufacturer of a certain product and a marketer who can reach large amounts of potential customers. For instance, an online store selling high-end design jewelry may want to begin an affiliate partnership with a blogger who writes mainly about jewelry and can reach tens of thousands of readers and jewelry-enthusiasts every week.