WHAT’S AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate marketing is a form of online marketing by which a company sells its products or services through third parties (affiliates) in exchange for a commission.
There are three parties involved in this process:

• The advertiser: It is the merchant, also called the creator or brand owner of the product or service.
• The affiliate: Also called a publisher or publisher. It is the person who, through her blog, YouTube channel or social networks, influences customers to buy the advertisers’ products. Affiliates can be bloggers, youtubers, influencers, or affiliate marketing companies.
• The user: The client or user is the one who acquires the product or service promoted by the affiliate.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

The dynamics of affiliate marketing is very simple. Through an affiliate platform, advertisers provide publishers with promotional material (links, banners) to publish on their website, on their YouTube videos or on their social networks.

When a user clicks on any of these links and makes a purchase, clicks a link or fills in a form (actions previously determined by the advertiser) the affiliate takes a commission. This commission has been previously established by the advertiser.

The whole process is managed through an affiliate marketing platform.

Most common commissions in affiliate marketing

The versatility of affiliate programs makes them suitable both for ecommerce that sell products online and for other types of businesses (lead capture, for example). These are the most common fees in affiliate marketing:

• CPA or cost per sale: the commission is paid once the sale of the product or service is confirmed. It is often a percentage of the order amount.
• CPC or cost per click: a commission is paid for each visit that the affiliate sends to the advertiser’s website.
• CPL or cost per lead: commission is paid for each contact generated by an affiliate. For example, potential customers who fill out a form to receive a catalog of the advertiser’s products.

Advantages of affiliate marketing for advertisers

For an online business, the main advantage of implementing an affiliate program is that, by paying only when the transaction is confirmed, they do not assume any risk or have to make any investment.

Also, affiliate marketing is perfectly complementary to other digital marketing strategies.

Advantages for affiliates

The main advantages for affiliates is the ability to make blog profitable without the need to make any investment. They don’t need to invest in any product or invent any service. They can easily monetize the effort they put into their website.

Nor do they have to worry about providing a customer support service or logistics or processing of sales or payments. All responsibility for these matters rests with the advertisers.

And payments are always guaranteed. The affiliate platform that supports the different campaigns is in charge of guaranteeing them.

For more information on the advantages of affiliate marketing you can consult the Sinapsis website. Online marketing experts, they just launched their own affiliate marketing platform.

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