Affiliate Marketing Network

E-commerce and online business:
In order to understand what affiliate marketing and advertising is about, you must first know a little about online business and commerce. While you are surfing on the Internet you must have come across a number of websites selling cards, phones, cameras, laptops, furniture, etc. These websites are primarily created for commercial purposes and they generate revenue by selling the products to online customers. On such websites are displayed the goods and services that are to be sold, shopping cart and an online purchase form that gets displayed once a customer clicks to purchase any product.

Affiliate marketing and advertising:
There are more websites that help in selling of the products and services and promoting them. These websites do not have a product of their own except the web space, which is in the form of website pages. What they do is provide the advertisements of commercial websites on their own sites and sometimes the purchase forms. These websites are known as affiliate websites and their owners as affiliates. In affiliate marketing a website owner provides third party marketing services. If commercial websites are virtual shops then affiliate sites are just their extensions.

Affiliate Marketing Network:
Affiliate marketing network is an agency that links the affiliates and the merchants, owners of the commercial websites. Affiliate marketing networks have been quite successful and primarily because of the large gulf that exists between merchants and the affiliates.

Over the years, publishers and the pioneers of e-commerce have developed on their own lines. On one side we have a large number of website owners who know just one thing – to put the content on the website and upload it. On the other side we have online businessmen who have been trading and selling their products to the remotest interiors across the continents. Their presence is very much there but to find them out and have a business deal with them asks for more than a search on web. Affiliate networks work on these very lines and connect the publishers with the traders.

What does an Affiliate Marketing Network offer?
An affiliate marketing network primarily deals in promotions and marketing on the web. Such a network has business deals with a number of merchants and online traders who are interested in availing the services of the publishers. There is a common platform, usually provided on the networks own website wherein publishers and merchants can register. The network takes advertising and marketing tasks from the advertisers (merchants) and then forwards them to the affiliates. The network relieves the publishers as well as advertisers for unnecessarily spending on maintenance of the accounts.

Paying the affiliates is the single most concern that merchants are often scared of. Consider a merchant whose banners are advertised by hundred affiliates. Then there are impressions and clicks that are to be tracked, monitored and the amount evaluated. Last but not least, imagine how many payments cheques it would require to compensate all affiliates. To get rid of all these impediments, the merchant prefers to avail the service of affiliate marketing network. The network is paid a fixed at regular intervals and it’s the network that pays the affiliates. No paper work required, no tracking required, nothing – just an account registered with a network.

Affiliate marketing networks have to adopt the compensation model of merchants which is usually based on the Cost Per Impression or Cost Per Action models. There is a slight difference between marketing and advertising when it comes to practice. In marketing what is essential is the presence where as in advertising what is important is the sales. That is why advertising networks provide for Pay-Per-Click mode of compensation.