Affiliate Marketing

An advertising scheme in which a company compensates third-party publishers to drive traffic or generate sales for their products and services.

These publishers are people or persons referred to as affiliates.

These affiliates promotes companies products and get commission for the product promoted, provided there is a lead to the promoted products. The commission paid by the advertising company steer ups affiliates to find a way and promote the company's sales.

When talking about affiliate marketing, a company compensates partners for business created from the affiliates.

Payment to affiliates differs, depending on the type of affiliate marketing scheme they do. 

Some marketing scheme pays affiliate per sales while some pay per click and some per impressions.

There are three types of of affiliate marketing scheme. 

1. Unattached affiliate marketing

2. Related affiliate marketing

3. Involved affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing started like beginning with the dust, but digital marketing, analytics and cookies have made affiliate marketing a billion-dollar industry.

A company running an affiliate marketing program can track the links that generate leads and internal analytics see how many converts to sales.

An affiliate could be a owner of numerous websites and email marketing lists. The wider it's network depends on the more websites or email lists the affiliate has.

An affiliate promotes products by running ads like the text ads, posting links on it's website, banner ads or sending emails to clientele.

Visitors who click the ads or link are redirected to the company's e-commerce site, if the visitor purchase the product or service, then the company that is advertising credits the affiliate. Commissions could be 2%, 5%, to 10%, of the sales price.

Having said that, you could say affiliate marketing is a win-win program for advertisers (company) and publishers (affiliate)

You can also read on: 

Types of affiliate marketing networks

How to become an affiliate marketer