What is Affiliate Marketing?
Most people outside of the Internet marketing industry generally give me a blank stare when I tell them I work as an affiliate marketer. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to explain what affiliate marketing is and come to find out that person just doesn’t get it. At that point in the conversation I just tell them I’m a web designer and that makes them happy as they can grasp that a little easier. Although I do web design, the bulk of my business is actually affiliate marketing.
So what exactly is affiliate marketing? At its basic element, it is just lead generation on the Internet. While I won’t get in the details of the different styles of affiliate marketing, what it boils down to is a business compensating an affiliate (me) for each customer or lead that is brought about by the affiliate marketers efforts.
Hopefully I haven’t lost you yet. Let me give you a real life example of what this looks like. You probably have heard of Amazon.com, but you might not be aware that they were one of the first companies to offer an affiliate program. Since Amazon has so many products, what I would do is create a website based around a certain product or similar products. Lets say I create a site about computer speakers that has all kinds of information on the newest products available. I’d than create links to Amazon.com through special links they give me so when people click on them, they will track that the customer came from my speaker site. Now if that customer makes a purchase from Amazon, I get paid a commission.
While there is a lot of variations of how affiliate marketing looks, hopefully that helps you grasp the concept. Here is an illustration from Wikipedia on affiliate marketing that gives you a visual of what is going on.
I was the one who gave the blank stare, huh? Dude, that whole first paragraph was a conversation you and I just had – woah. Hey, but now I get it. Pretty cool, we need this for selling SBUs.
You know it. Actually I wrote this a few hours before you came in, so you are off the hook. Yeah, we could setup a program for the SBUs.