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Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
STRUCTURE:-
The industry has four core players:[citation needed]
the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’)
the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments)
the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’)
the customer
The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates, and specialized third party vendors.[citation needed]
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 (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content 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.[citation
TYPES OF AFFILIATE WEBSITES:-
Affiliate websites are often categorized by merchants (advertisers) and affiliate networks. There are currently no industry-wide standards for the categorization. The following types of websites are generic, yet are commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers.
Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers’ offers (i.e., search arbitrage)
Price comparison service websites and directories
Loyalty websites, typically characterized by providing a reward or incentive system for purchases via points, miles, cash back
Cause Related Marketing sites that offer charitable donations
Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions
Content and niche market websites, including product review sites
Personal websites
Weblogs and websites syndication feeds
E-mail marketing list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in -mail lists that typically employ e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more content-heavy
Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website
Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparisons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates
Cost per action networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated with their own network of affiliates
Websites using adbars (e.g. Absence) to display context-sensitive advertising for products on the site
Virtual currency that offers advertising views in exchange for a handout of virtual sharing in a game or other virtual platform.
File – sharing: Web sites that host directories of music, movies, games and other software. Users upload content to file-hosting sites and then post descriptions of the material and their download links on directory sites. Uploaders are paid by the file-hosting sites based on the number of times their files are downloaded. The file-hosting sites sell premium download access to the files to the general public. The websites that host the directory services sell advertising and do not host the files themselves.
Video sharing websites: youtube videos are often utilized by affiliates to do affiliate marketing. A person would create a video and place a link to the affiliate product they are promoting in the video itself and within the description.



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