What is an Affiliate?
An affiliate is anyone with a webpage that earns commission by placing a banner from an advertiser on their site. An affiliate can either get paid per click (CPC), per lead (CPL), or per sale (CPS).
How does it work?
A visitor comes to the affiliate's website where the advertiser's banner link is displayed. If the visitor clicks on one of the links, that visitor goes directly to the advertiser's site. If that visitor buys something on the advertiser's site, a commission is paid to the affiliate promoting the advertiser's product or service. The affiliate's reward varies from advertiser to advertiser and program to program, depending on the terms of the advertiser's offer.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.
Affiliate Networks
An affiliate network acts as an intermediary between publishers (affiliates) and (merchant) affiliate programs. It allows publishers to find affiliate programs, which are suitable for their website and it helps websites offering affiliate programs reach its target audience.
For merchants, services can include providing tracking technology, reporting tools, payment processing, and access to a large base of publishers. For affiliates, services can include providing one-click application to new merchants, reporting tools, and payment aggregation.
There are three main SA affiliate networks featured on this website, they are Traffic Synergy, ZA OfferForge and Earnings Online
The networks are free to join for affiliates. The merchant on the other hand has to pay a fee. Traditional affiliate networks might charge an initial setup fees and/or a recurring maintenance fees. This differs from network to network. It is common for affiliate networks to charge merchants a percentage of the commission paid to the affiliates as fee for their services.
Traditional affiliate networks allow the merchant to offer its publishers revenue share or cost per action as compensation method. The majority of merchant programs prefer revenue share over cost per action
Affiliate Marketing Today
The best kept secret of the Internet marketing industry is probably that adult and gaming sites really pioneered and pushed the online marketing envelope. Today, many of these effective concepts have been adopted by non-adult websites. Ironically, adult sites are also the entities that gave birth to many unacceptable and substandard online practices.
In the late 1990's and early 2000's, it was very costly to launch and run an Affiliate Program. With the advancement in technology and software development, the cost required to launch a successful Affiliate Program has decreased dramatically. It can still be expensive if you go through a big network type solution like Traffic Synergy or ZA OfferForge but there are other solutions available to merchants now.
Why does Google Hate Affiliates?
Be sure not to have too many affiliate banners on your website as google will see this as spam. Read the full artile at http://www.organicspam.com