How Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate Marketing is basically allows merchants for increase their market reach and market share by paying the publishers or affiliates or independent agents on a sales or lead or CPA or cost per action basis. Affiliate only get amount when a visitor comes on their website and then do some action and then go to the merchant website to purchase something. If the visitor buys something from the merchant website and then the referrer will get paid. Some Affiliate Programs are cost per click basis and some are sales or leads based. In CPC (Cost per click) programs the affiliates get benefited by the clicks on the ads or feeds and in CPA (Cost per action) Based programs affiliates get benefited when the visitor make some purchase or action on the merchant website.
According to the history, Affiliate Marketing started by Amazon first time when he paid some commissions to a lady for selling books for them. From then this affiliate and merchant programs comes into an action and now this industry is groomed day by day. The basic approach for a affiliate is to focus on the market share of the merchant, The publisher must have the product knowledge what he is promoting on his website and what will be the results comes from them. The visitor should be targeted to a product or a country. The affiliate marketing is basically a subset of search engine marketing. Some affiliates makes thousands of dollars from the merchants.
Merchants can get most benefit when they are using a large affiliate network. In a large affiliate network the merchant can get more popular in the affiliates and get maximum traffic. The merchant can get benefited only when there programs are attractive like they are good paymasters to the affiliate. Nowadays thousands of merchant are promoting their products by affiliate marketing and they are getting good amount of traffic from the affiliates.Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN dislikes these websites because they are promoting other website links on the websites.
Success in affiliate programs is not easier, affiliate program requires very hard work because now a days affiliate programs are much bigger and more competitive now as compared to past. Affiliate Marketing is basically a mutual relationship between a merchant and a publisher. These affiliate programs are four types:
Cost per click (CPC) - When a visitor click on the merchant advertisement and the affiliate get paid by per click.
Cost per lead (CPL) - Affiliate will get paid when the lead generated.Cost per sale (CPS) - Affiliate will get paid when the sale generated (Maximum Earning Program)
To increase website traffic, website publicity in the visitors and get maximum sales revenue for affiliates and merchants, Affiliate Marketing is the best option of Search Engine Marketing.

This Article is published by Varun Saxena, SEM Consultant for Dimension India SEO Company.

Posted in: Internet Marketing,Keyword Research,PPC