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Affiliate marketing has
quickly become one of the most popular and the most effective ways to
advertise on the Internet. The premise of affiliate marketing is very
simple.
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A
company, let’s say eBay, goes to another web site and asks them
to place a banner or link to eBay on their site. Every time a user
clicks on that eBay banner and visits the site, the owner of the
original site gets a commission. It’s as simple as that.
The history of affiliate marketing goes back to
approximately 1994 with the trailblazing music website www.CDNow.com. They were,
as far as most people know, the first site to pay other sites for directing
Internet traffic to them.
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Internet giant Amazon.com soon caught on and became
the site most associated with affiliate marketing. Today, the practice of
affiliate marketing is used by essentially every major web site in the
world.
 Why affiliate marketing?
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One
of the reasons that affiliate marketing has proven to be so popular is
that it is completely based on performance. In most cases, the company
doing the advertising doesn’t pay a single penny to the site that is
carrying their ad unless there is evidence that Internet traffic has
been driven to the advertising site. There are, however, other ways of
doing affiliate marketing. |
Some
advertising sites have paid the site hosting their link based not on
the number of times an original IP visits through the link, but on the
number of times the banner ad was “seen.” This method
presents a whole host of problems since things like hit counts can be
forged and there is no way to insure that just because someone visited
a web page that had your logo on it that they even saw it or if they
did, that they even knew what it was.
Other methods of affiliate marketing include paying only when a link is
followed AND some kind of transaction takes place. This can be tough on
the site hosting the link because the attention span of the average
Internet user isn’t long enough in most cases to follow a link
and then either complete a purchase, or
fill out a form of some kind. The conventional method simply pays a
host a commission for every time an original IP is directed to their
site.
In a matter of only a few years, affiliate marketing has become one of
the most cost effective ways to drive traffic to a site. Since, in most
cases, both the advertiser and the host profit from the set up, there
is no reason to believe that affiliate marketing won’t be
dominant advertising method well into the future.
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