What is Online Affiliation and Affiliate Marketing - A Candid Analysis

Affiliation is a new vibrant web marketing opportunity which is getting greatly widespread these day as a unique opportunity for online money making. It allows an affiliate or a publisher to earn his commission as he promotes and makes successful sales of  products and services that are available at a merchant's site. Publishers can get connected or affiliated with a merchant's e-commerce website and selects opportunities that he can work upon. There are several criterions based on which an affiliate can select a particular merchant and the products and services available with it. For truly understanding the core concept of affiliation, it is important to have a well-rounded knowledge and understanding of the complete lifecycle of affiliate marketing. Several marketers know very little about the history of this marketing technique which is of paramount importance, especially to understand this subject and for utilizing it to the brim.

Affiliation: What it is all about and how it works?

The very advent of the concept of affiliation and affiliate marketing results from the backdrop of an acclaimed partnership between e-commerce sites and one or more publisher websites which act as affiliates entitled to commission per conversion. The broad principle comprises of the following:

1) The affiliate establishes a catalog of products on his websites and drives traffic on his website to try and induce conversion. 

2) This catalog is a list of products from the merchant site which is promoted by an affiliate. 

3) Conversion Point: A product sale or a lead generation or a product trial can be a conversion point as per the agreement between the merchant and the publisher. 

4) Every conversion gets registered at the merchant server and is duly recognized in terms of commissions made to affiliates as per the agreed upon terms and conditions. 

5) An agreement not only contains the terms of conversion but also the terms of payment. 

6) Many affiliate programs pay you on per-month basis while several of them might pay you on fortnight basis - this an be ascertained as per an agreement between the parties involved in an affiliate program.

7) At times, there might be more than two parties involved - to cite and example, there are CPA networks which work as mediators between the merchants and affiliates. There are a few top CPA networks around at this point in time who are getting good success with the CPA Marketing model and who have numerous publishers promoting their offers.

8) CPA marketing is also considered as a type of affiliate marketing wherein conversion points are actions taken by the end users. Sales might not always be decisive for such offers to convert. Say, a first-page basic data submission can also many a time act as conversion.

Generally, the remuneration can be promised to an affiliate depends on the following types of conversion structures. These can either be used alone or even in mixed mode.

• CPA: The Cost Per Action is probably an easier method which might be taken up by rookies particularly. This allows a publisher to be paid every time there is a sale made. Compensation may be made either in cash (say, $ earned per sale) or even a percentage of sales made (say, 10% of sales).

• CPL: The Cost Per Lead also pays the affiliate further to completion of an "action" which might be performed by a prospect or end user or publisher's website or web page. This action should result in the generation of a lead. To cite an example: for every person who registers to merchant's newsletter(email marketing), the affiliate will receive due compensation in return.

• CPC: The Cost Per Click compensates an affiliate each time an end user clicks on the catalog of products or subscribes to services provides by a merchant.

• CPM: The Cost Per Mille(thousand) compensates the affiliate in for another unique reason. This compensation gets materialized upon the actuation of a thousand user actions. The conversion point is a thousand views of a product catalog. However, such offers are probably rare to come by nowadays.

Remuneration process for Affiliates to subscribe to:

White Labels: Another interesting form which is commonly used for affiliation is the usage of white labels. In order to understand this concept, we can take the example of an internet application development site. Call this site Alpha and assume that this site sells application development seats to developers. This site promises earning to other sites as per affiliate program, allowing other sites to sell developer seats. Assume that websites Omega and Delta agree to this proposal on the basis of this affiliate white label program launched by site Alpha. Considering that the sites Omega and Delta have agreed to such a proposal and worked out an agreement individually with site Alpha, new opportunities for selling the application developer seats will be positioned on these two third party websites. When users purchase the seats at sites Omega or Delta, they will be duly redirected to the website Alpha. However, the user will enjoy the experience as if they were residing at either of these third party websites, depending on which of these websites the user has got associated with. This is only on account of the fact that the user has subscribed to a developer seat at a website which is using a white label of the mother site Alpha. Also, pertaining to the fact that these sites are white labels, the site Alpha will be seen as if through the filters of white labels. The end users will relish the experience of working on web pages that are presented in the cosmetics of third party websites.

CPA Marketing: CPA Marketing is primarily driven by CPA networks. Once you get affiliated to such networks, ou can log into their dashboards areas and identify those offers which might get you interested. You can use the affiliate links and banners offered by them and promote offers from vendors who are looking forward to certain conversions for benefiting their business. CPA marketing would like you to induce certain action on offers at you own site web pages. This is often seen as an easier form of affiliation since the comparatively complex sales completions are generally not the trigger for converting an offer.

How did Affiliation Programs Begin in the First place - A Background?

What other than top notch E-commerce organizations would have been instrumental in starting this unique journey of affiliate marketing? Yes, you got it correct! It is Amazon, the famous organization on e-commerce segment, which began the started this concept way back in the 90's. It started from a very simple notion that they could pay for third party partner websites to mention their books catalog. This was the cardinal moment in history which set into motion the vessel of affiliate marketing. It was was such a defining moment when it was ascertained that other sites which contribute towards sales by positioning product catalogs and links will be duly rewarded in terms of monitory benefits. This principle has been of tremendous utility as this enabled the e-commerce major to increase its traffic and thereby, sales of products. As times change they have started selling many more articles apart from books but the affiliate program that was devices way back is still instrumental in enhancing sales. This program became a measuring rod in analyzing the potential of internet marketing. This not only augments laser targeted traffic, but also the obvious benefit that arises on account of it - successful conversions. Wherever there is a possibility of making money online in an upright and trusted manner, rigorous fan following is deemed to proceed.

With this thundering success, the affiliate system has successfully spread around the world and managed to reach European countries towards the end of the 90's. There would hardly be any nook and corner in the IT-driven world of today, where affiliate marketing is not making it mark and presence known. It might only be seen to be in the interest of publishers and content writers that they utilize such a mind-boggling means of online money making. The potential for online money making though, rest heavily on the shoulders of decent traffic generation and affiliate programs are no exception to this.