How do you go about advertising your business online? This article will provide you with information about affiliate marketing and how you can employ regular users to advertise your business and increase traffic! Whether you\'re a small business just starting out or a large corporation, the following information will be beneficial to you. Adding an affiliate marketing program to your marketing plan can be one of the most cost-effective and easiest ways for your organization to advertise. By offering an affiliate marketing program to your users, you can increase traffic, gain more online exposure and pay only when results are produced. What is Affiliate Marketing? The concept of affiliate marketing began as a revenue-sharing program where businesses paid commission to people who referred new business. When it was finally introduced online, affiliate marketing quickly became a useful marketing tool that helped grow fledgling businesses like CDNow and Amazon into e-commerce powerhouses. During November 1994, CDNOW launched its BuyWeb program. In July 1996, Amazon launched an \"associates\" program and now counts hundreds of thousands of sites in its network. The basic model for affiliate marketing works like this: A website owner registers with your company\'s affiliate marketing program. After receiving approval, he or she then puts various links, banners, videos and/or products on their web site. When visitors click through on these links and purchase or sign up for something, the web site owner is paid a commission for generating business for your company. Websites and services based on Web 2.0 concepts blogging and interactive online communities, for example have impacted the affiliate marketing world as well. Today, you can find traces of affiliate marketing campaigns just about everywhere you look online. They are in the form of banner ads, videos, podcasts, blogs, and more. They are on e-commerce sites, Facebook accounts, personal webpages even a MySpace page. There are basically three ways to increase traffic and revenue through affiliate marketing: Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing - Every time an internet user click on the affiliate link at the affiliate website and follows that link to the merchant\'s website, a certain amount of money is deposited in the affiliate\'s account. This amount can be pennies or dollars depending on the product and amount of the commission. Pay Per Sale Affiliate Marketing - Every time an affiliate website sends a visitor to your site via advertising and it results in a sale, a commission is deposited into the affiliate\'s account. Pay Per Lead Affiliate Marketing - Every time an affiliate website sends a visitor to your site via advertising and it results in a subscription, a flat-rate amount is deposited into the affiliate\'s account. Both online retailers and consumers like affiliate marketing programs because, in most cases, it offers a performance-based pay scale. The more an affiliate sells for a company, the more commission they make. If an affiliate sells nothing, they make nothing and lose nothing. Retailers love this model because they do not incur a marketing expense unless an affiliate produces sales, and they reap the benefits of branding, online advertising, impressions and increased web traffic.
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