Reasons behind increasing trend of Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate marketing?

It is type of marketing which consists of network, retailer, publisher (affiliate) and consumer as its four core players. Considered as performance based marketing in which a consumer is brought by the effort of affiliate (publisher). Over the years, market has grown so much that it has produced secondary level which includes affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialised vendors.

Constituents of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a blend of internet marketing methods because affiliates frequently approach regular advertising methods. Affiliate marketing consist of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), paid search engine marketing which is known as PPC (Pay per click), content marketing and e-mail marketing. It is also believed that affiliates often use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of products or services which are offered by a partner.

Affiliate and Referral marketing

Many times, people often get confused between affiliate and referral marketing because both of these marketing forms are used by third parties to push sales to the retailer. These two marketing forms can also be differentiated like affiliate marketing purely depends upon financial motivations whereas referral marketing lies more on trust and personal relationships.

Why advertisers overlook affiliate marketing?

Even though affiliate marketing is often ignored by advertisers because search engines, e-mail and content marketing generally carry a low profile. It continues to play a significant role in e-retailer’s marketing strategies.

The Growth of Affiliate Marketing

The social media portals have led affiliate marketing to grow more rapidly. The early age of internet marketing saw e-commerce websites as the tool of enhancing marketing and later on it has become an integrated constituent of the overall business plan. According to the recent researches and surveys, affiliate marketing has regenerated contextual advertising programs from various sources like retail, travel, telecom, education and publishing.

Cost per click is also one form of affiliate marketing in which the need for an affiliate is to increase the visits of consumers to the specific sites. It is also observed that affiliates are able to send the most closely targeted traffic to the known advertisers in many possible ways. And in this process risk and losses are also shared between an affiliate and marketer.

The industries of retail, adult gambling and file sharing services received the highest growth in 2006. Moreover, affiliate marketing also benefited the industries like telecom, finance and travel by booming their revenue to a high level.

The next big thing that affiliate marketing brought was blogging and interactive online communities which were based on Web 2.0 concepts. The most adept thing about these services is that there has been enhancement in improved communications between an affiliate and consumers. It has propagated affiliate marketing channels to personal bloggers, writers and independent website owners. These kinds of contextual advertisements allowed publishers who are having lower web traffic to place affiliate ads on websites.

Affiliate marketing is often called as sales marketing because employees are given commission on each sales they have made along with few incentives in case they achieved the objectives of the company.

Advertisers do not employ affiliates as they promote their products or services but then the compensation models are applied in affiliate marketing. Affiliates are often called as the extended sales force for your business.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

The new era of social media like YouTube have redefined affiliate marketing by helping companies to serve promotional ads to different visitors. It is also said that YouTube video-makers have also been benefitted through the process of affiliate marketing.

Thus the modernisation of internet which led to the recreation of digital marketing is perhaps the most beneficial tool for the business to flourish. In the past couple of years, many social media sites like Facebook, Twitter have been able to make their mark landmarks in Silicon Valley. These social media portals are used worldwide and the companies behind its making generate revenues in the terms of millions. The foremost promising thing about affiliate marketing is that it has socially unified the world by bringing people together through several blogging sites and has created a large base for the consumer to gain information or to even start his own business by becoming an entrepreneur.