What Is Affiliate Marketing?

You may have already heard of so-called affiliate marketing, also known as partner marketing. But do you know what it actually is?

Affiliate marketing is an agreement between an online store owner and a website owner, where the latter markets the products of the former, who in return offers a certain commission for each product sold. Affiliate marketing is certainly one of those forms of marketing where both business parties are satisfied — every web publisher wants additional income, and every online store owner wants more products sold. If you also have your own online store, consider this type of marketing.

How to Get Started

Set up a so-called affiliate (partner) program and allow other webmasters to sign up for it. The higher the commission you offer them, the more interested they will be in promoting your products.

Advantages

The advantage of affiliate marketing is certainly that you “pay exclusively for products sold.” You have surely heard the saying that half the money you invest in advertising is wasted, but we never know which half. With affiliate marketing, you do not overpay for advertising — in fact, you earn additional revenue from it.

How to Track Sales

You are probably also wondering how you can track sales on other sites, or whether website owners can deceive you. The system that records completed sales is called affiliate tracking. It is based on cookies, specially generated URLs, or ID numbers for each partner. Affiliate tracking thus traces and records visitors who came to your site through your partners, ensuring the reliability of this type of marketing is fully guaranteed.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing is a very popular form of marketing used by all the largest online stores in the world (e.g., Amazon & eBay), as well as online banks (e.g., Skrill & Neteller).