Affiliate Marketing: Simple and Effective

For companies that use the Internet to sell products and/or services, affiliate marketing can become an easy way to integrate a large part of a company’s marketing plans and increase profits. E-commerce as we know it owes its popularity and effectiveness to affiliate marketing. Think of popular sites such as Amazon.com or CD NOW (BuyWeb) and you’ll see what affiliate marketing has done to boost their income.

It can be hard to believe that affiliate marketing relies on a simple yet enormously effective idea. In essence, a webmaster becomes an affiliate by displaying merchant’s advertisements on his or her site. This affiliate can get paid through one of three ways: per click (Cost-Per-Click (CPC) program), per action (Cost-Per-Action (CPA) program) or per sale (Cost-Per-Sale (CPS) program).

In a CPC program, the affiliate gets paid every time a visitor clicks on the merchant’s ad. Because of many fraud click sites, increasing adware and many other fraudulent ploys, this is one of the least favorite affiliate marketing programs.

In a CPA program, the affiliate gets paid for a sale, registration, or other “action” taken by the visitor who clicked on the ad located on the affiliate’s website.

The CPS program is the preferred affiliate marketing method. The affiliate gets paid only when products or services are purchased from the merchant’s website via the visitor clicking on an ad on the affiliate’s website. Both CPA and CPS allow the merchant to share his revenue or give a commission to the affiliate based on sales.

Affiliate marketing can benefit both the merchant and affiliate and offers very little or no risk. Many merchants enjoy using this preferred form of advertising for their e-commerce websites and businesses.