A brief overview on the concept of Affiliate marketing

[Purbasha T]

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It is an application of crowdsourcing. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site.

The Affiliate Marketing industry has four core players at its heart: the Merchant (also known informally as 'Retailer' or 'Brand'), the Network, the Publisher (also known informally as 'the Affiliate') and the Customer. The market has grown sufficiently in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including Affiliate Management Agencies, Super-Affiliates and Specialized Third Parties vendors.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing

And that is exactly what most of the giveaway websites are, Affiliates. They are involved in Affiliate Marketing.

Not many people are aware of marketing of this sort; because as soon as they hear about these, they straightaway jump onto the conclusion that it is one of those millions of scam advertisement etc etc that we all come across every single day.

Now the way we can get benefitted is that we can be a part of any of the well-known Affiliate organisations and get customers for any of the companies these organisations are Affiliates of. And as a result, these organisations will give us a part of the commission that they receive from all those companies because of the customers we have brought in.

And getting customers shouldn't sound like a job that people do knocking every door of an area and get people to sign up for things etc etc. You can make people you know your customers (as that would be the most convenient). And once they become your customers and complete their own offers, they themselves can start the Affiliate Marketing.

It is perfectly within the law with no catches and though it sounds like 'free stuff'' (again like those bad old scams) there isn't anything free tbh. You're working for the organisations and getting paid/rewards in exchange. And almost all the big big companies all over the world have tens of affiliates working for them everywhere.

Overall - it's a win-win situation for everyone involved.

- The companies get customers
- The Affiliates get commissions from the companies
- The Affiliate workers (us) get part of those commissions from the Affiliates
- The customers (by becoming a customer) now themselves can become Affiliate workers and start getting commissions by getting more customers.

To name a few of the companies in the UK that have Affiliates would be: Sky, BT, LoveFilm, HSBC, AA, E.ON, ASDA etc.
USA/Canada: Blockbuster, Homstead, Intuit, Video Professor, Next Millenium, Discover, LiveDrive etc etc.

And these are just very few of the hundreds of other companies worldwide.

The only thing to be careful of in this marketing thing is to get involved with an Affiliate organisation that is recognised by everyone, so that we can really be sure that our efforts will surely bear fruits.

Anyway, to sum it up, there couldn't have been an easier job to get involved with that has the least amount of hassles, if any, and the amount of time spent is minimal too. So It's just about understanding the simple procedure and then boom!

So give it a thought people coz that's a really fruitful way to spend your leisure. And what more! You can do all these sitting at home.

And last couple of months, after doing some deep deep research (unofficial, ofcourse ); I have become what you can say a mini-pro in this field. ..So anyone needing any help to understand this more or asking questions are welcome. And trust me! This thing is as good as it gets.