Another look at Affiliate Marketing

It's funny how I, a web developer for so many years and a project manager for some time didn't really seriously consider blogging as something I'd spend hours at. Perhaps I'm just damn too busy to do it but lately I figured why not contribute to the blogosphere? I am such a talker and I love an intelligent conversation.

Alrighty, I might as well start with the topic at hand because YOU might already be bored to tears. =) So, I wanna talk about affiliate networking. By sheer luck (and because I'm smart - jk), a project landed on me about a year ago and guess what? I had to make an affiliate network, like program it right! I'm like what??? What the? How does that work? Really... what? After a lot of back and forth with the client company I was supposed to make it for... I got introduced to the world of affiliate networking wooohoo!

I would really want to talk about the technical side of it but I don't want to add to your boredom.

So let's have some affiliate marketing basics. In an affiliate marketing network, there are three key players. Let's start with the advertiser or merchant. An advertiser or a merchant is someone or a company who is selling or promoting a product or a service . Take for example, M&M's, ... Those are advertisers. Advertisers can go to an affiliate network to market their product in the form of banners, email campaigns, text ads and what have you. See those banners popping up your screen every now and then? Those banners are making money for sure.

Here goes the second player and the "middleman" and is called the "affiliate network". The affiliate network will load the campaign creatives (banners etc) to the system so that affiliates can grab those banners and put them to their websites. Did I mention "affiliates"? You are right! They are the third player in this loop. The affiliates who signed up to the network can now get advertising materials in the form of javascript or HTML codes to post on their websites.

Here's the process. In an affiliate marketing, there's this what we call a campaign or offer. The advertiser pays the affiliate network to circulate a campaign. When an affiliate grabs an ad from the affiliate system and post the ad on his/her website, there's a chance that a visitor of the site will click on the ad. Some advertisers pay for click and that's pay-per-click. On a PPL system or pay-per-lead, the affiliate will be paid a commission when a visitor clicks on a link or banner on his/her, and then purchases a product on the merchant's site or registers for something. The affiliate network will pay the affiliate and in the process gets a cut from leads.

Everybody happy eh? The advertiser or merchant gets the volume of traffic and sell too. Affiliate network gets a cut in the commission or gets a separate commission for advertising. The affiliates get commission for generating leads.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you have more affiliate networking questions.