Affiliate marketing refers to a reward scheme set-up by online merchants to produce sales and grow their business.
Basically, those who register as an ‘affiliate’ with the merchant get income share, sales commission, or a set rate depending on the criteria that the merchant has actually set up. The most common schemes are the Cost-Per-Action (CPA) and Cost-per-sale (CPS) plans— suggesting that an affiliate is compensated from a recommendation to the merchant just if the customer/internet user subscribes or purchases to the merchant’s site.
This is also carefully connected in with the Cost-per-mil (CPM) technique, where the affiliate is paid for just displaying the adverts on their website. These 2 methods just account for 1% of affiliate marketing, due to numerous fraudsters taking advantage of it and for that reason becoming too risky for the merchant.
Affiliate marketing owes its roots to the revenue sharing concept that has been around long prior to the internet. Nevertheless, affiliate marketing itself was birthed in late 1994, when companies like CDNOW and Amazon.com saw this low-cost chance to grow their online service.
The success of those companies shows in lots of ways the success of the affiliate marketing system.
Affiliate marketing can often be puzzled with Google’s AdSense plan, which is not totally the same. Google’s AdSense works with contextual advertising, and is not considered real Affiliate Marketing.