Affiliate Program Review
The Affiliate Program, What is it?
Hello there, It's Amy again! When I first started out trying to make money online, I started with an affiliate program. Chances are, If you're trying to make money online, chances are, you've heard of an Affiliate program (Or Affiliate Marketing) as well. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I didn't know what it was at first. So, Now that I know, I thought I would share my knowledge. If you're confused or simply curious about what exactly an Affiliate program is, you've come to the right place!
The definitive definition of An affiliate Program is:
A type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliate for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.
The basics of an Affiliate Program
The industry has four main parties:
1) The merchant, or business
2) The network: Contains the offers that affiliates can promote and
takes care of tracking sales and payments.
3)the Affiliate: promotes the product
4) The customer
I should note here that the market has grown in complexity enough to grow a secondary tier of people, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors, but these do not always come into play.
Affiliate program marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods in some ways. This is mostly because members of an affiliate program often use many of the same advertising methods that all e-marketers use.
Those methods include:
Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
paid search engine marketing: PPC= Pay Per Click, ppc= Price Per Click, cpc= Cost Per Click (etc.)
E-mail Marketing
Display advertising
However, affiliates often use more unusual techniques as well. For example, publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Though Affiliate program marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, (both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer) they are two different forms of marketing. The main difference between the two, is that an affiliate program marketer relies on financial motivations alone to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships.
Origins of the Affiliate Program
The concept of an affiliate program on the Internet was first conceived, practice, and patented by William J. Tobin. Mr Tobin was also the founder of PC Flowers & Gifts. PC Flowers & Gifts launched the novel Network in 1989 and it remained on the service until 1996. By 1993, PC Flowers & Gifts generated sales in excess of $6 million per year! In 1998, PC Flowers and Gifts developed the business model of paying a commission on sales, and the Affiliate program was born!
(Reference-Chicago Tribune-Oct, 4, 1995)
(Ref The Sunsentinal 1991 and www.dankawaski.com)
Of course, The concept of paying commission for sales and referred business had been used in the real business world for many years before the affiliate program and the Internet. Knowing that, it seems odd that it took so long to carry over. commission principles to mainstream e-commerce didn't happen until November 1994. That's almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web.
Oh! Fun fact: Cybererotica was among the early innovators in affiliate marketing with a cost per click program. Is anyone surprised?
Amazon's role in the Affiliate program
Amazon.com (Amazon) launched its affiliate program in July 1996. Amazon affiliates could place banner or text links on their site for individual products, or link directly to the Amazon home page.
When visitors clicked from the affiliate's website to Amazon and purchased a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon was not the first merchant to offer an affiliate program, as you now know, but its program was the first to become widely known. It served as a model for other programs down the road.
In February 2000, Amazon announced that it had been granted a patent on components of an affiliate program. The patent application was submitted in June 1997, which predates most affiliate programs, but not all. PC Flowers & Gifts.com (October 1994), AutoWeb.com (October 1995), Kbkids.com/BrainPlay.com (January 1996), EPage (April 1996), and several others were around before hand. However, you snooze you loose when it comes to patents.
the Problem with the Affiliate program
The biggest problems I've found with the affiliate program all stem from the same thing. Greedy, or thoughtless Affiliates using less than savory methods of attracting attention. Some of their unscrupulous behavior includes spamming e-mails and search engines, false advertising, forced clicks to get tracking cookies, and adwere. This can give the majority affiliates with, those with, integrity a bad name. It also makes it harder for the honorable members of an affiliate program to get traffic because search engines take measures to avoid and remove the clutter by changing their rules and making it harder to get noticed.
Affiliate program conclusion
Well, that's all I can really think of to share. You now know what an Affiliate program is and how it works. I hope you found this information useful. If you're interested in working from home like me and want Free information of the system that I use to make money, Click HERE now! Thanks for reading!