Small-sized businesses today are confidently taking on their bigger counterparts thanks to rapid evolution of the Internet marketing techniques. In this new mix of things, Affiliate Marketing has fast grown in tandem with the advent of the Internet. Affiliate marketers sure are among the great success stories of today’s Internet Age. The online world has been witnessing an explosion of innovative ideas, services and exciting opportunities like Affiliate Marketing. In fact, it has now become a profitable activity that almost any aspiring individual can join in; and for most, the results are very impressive, at little cost!

Emergence of Affiliate Marketing
After the World Wide Web truly established itself in the mid-nineties, businesses were primed to cash on the breadth of this new technology, despite the fact that there was no means of gauging the spread of Internet globally.

Of course, it did not take much long to follow that amount of web traffic was obviously the key to power and success. As a logical response to this equation, Affiliate Marketing emerged. While the concept now is commonplace; then, it was indeed revolutionary. Since the hard work was done mostly by affiliates, the cost fixed for the merchants was proportionately small, albeit the rewards were mutual.

The basis of Affiliate Marketing
This lucrative form of Internet-based marketing enables ‘affiliates’ (in other words. publishers) of relevant merchants (to put it simply, advertisers) to draw a reward or commission depending on the overall success of their effort to boost traffic or drive sales on the merchant’s website.

Based on the specific payout model, the merchant will pay the affiliate a fixed percentage: per referral, per action, per click, per sale etc. The term also denotes the entire domain of activity that has been largely built around the eponymous marketing strategy.

What are its key features?
As already described, Affiliate Marketing is now one of the most popular and established forms of Web-based marketing. Its goal is to increase sales or generate greater leads for interested merchants or businesses. Following are some of the key features of Affiliate Marketing:

• It is often termed as a form of ‘Pay for Performance’ Marketing.  This clearly implies that Affiliate Marketing relies heavily on performance. Accordingly, rewards are allocated.
• Similar to a sales force, savvy affiliate marketers help a company expand its potential buyer base.
• Factors that define the success
• An affiliate – unlike a sales associate – is not able to influence the visitors once they go away the referral site.  Once they leave the site, the merchant needs to take steps for “closing the deal,” by trying to sustain the interest.

Success of most Affiliate Marketing programs hinges on the definition of mutually cooperative effort. In this context, among the factors affiliates should consider while selecting merchant partners are quality of services/ products and effectiveness of sales pages. The two combine to ensure maximization of conversion.

In the next post of this series on Affiliate Marketing, we shall consider more aspects that are critical to its conceptualization and execution.