With an estimated 4.5 billion dollars being paid to affiliates in 2016, a lot of people out there are asking the question, “What is affiliate marketing about?” Let’s have a look.
According to Wikipedia:
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
Read it again – slowly. Think about it. Let it sink in.
What is Affiliate Marketing About? Let’s Take Another Look – This Time in Plain English
Businesses have products and services they want to exchange for money – that’s what keeps them in business! They develop plans to market those products and services to increase the number of people who are aware of the product or service and thereby increase (hopefully) the number of people buying their product or service.
That’s marketing.
To increase the number of people who are aware of their product or service, some businesses will look to augment their corporate marketing team with affiliates – people who are affiliated with the business, but who are not employees. It’s more of a contract labor relationship.
The affiliate agrees help market the things the business wants to sell. The business agrees to compensate the affiliate when they succeed in getting other people to take a certain action.
In some cases, the action that affiliate marketers need to get people to take is as simple as clicking on a link or filling out a form. In others, the business only pays when the affiliate’s actions lead to a sale. There really are a lot of goals that a business might choose to pay an affiliate for getting someone else to do.
So, we could sum this up very nicely by saying that affiliate marketing is about promoting other peoples’ or business’ products in exchange for some sort of compensation.
That’s affiliate marketing in a nutshell.
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