Affiliate Marketing is a method of driving sales of a product or service using a third party sales force that only get paid on results. You are paying on results which mean you are getting more sales for less risk. Affiliate marketing is, first and foremost, about relationships. It relies on a relationship between a merchant (ie. Retailer) and you, the affiliate/publisher, as well as a relationship between you and consumers. When you promote the merchant’s product or service offerings (on your blog, website, social media feed, etc.) and a consumer purchases a product/service from the brand based on your promotion, the merchant pays you a revenue share of the sale that you helped generate.

Affiliates can be individual bloggers, publishers, and influencers as well as companies. Examples include:

• Coupon sites
• Content/blogging sites
• Loyalty/reward sites
• Deal sites
• Influencer networks

Affiliates can get compensated in a variety of ways, which are determined by the merchant. The three most common are pay per sale or pay per lead. Affiliates only get paid when their promotional efforts actually result in a transaction. Most often, all payments earned by affiliates are paid out through the third-party network the program is hosted on.

In affiliate marketing, affiliate programs are run on affiliate networks. Networks help affiliates register and apply to individual programs and act as the trusted intermediary between affiliates and merchants. For example, networks host the merchants’ creative (banners, links, etc.), handle all tracking and reporting, and automatically pay out commissions to affiliates based on the rules set by the merchant. The network uses cookies to track a customer’s progress from the affiliate’s blog/website (or multiple affiliates’ websites) through the merchant’s shopping cart. The network then automatically pays out commissions to affiliates based on the rules set by the merchant. A few of the most common affiliate networks are ShareASale, Commission Junction, LinkConnector, Admitad and Linkshare.

We do manage Shareasale, Linkshare, CJ, Linkconnector, Pepperjam, Admitad, Clixgalore and Commission Factory.