What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is simply a way that a company gets its products or services in front of potential customers. The way they do it is by directly or indirectly hiring a person that has a website, blog or email lists and campaigns. The person hired is not an employee, but a publisher. That publisher promotes your product on his or her website, blog or in email campaigns(for discussion purposes on this page site refers to any of the previous three terms). The company or “merchant” decides how the publisher or “affiliate” gets paid.

How does a Merchant pay the Affiliate?

An affiliate gets paid by one of several different ways depending on the product or service, and the program offered by the merchant. Here are some ways a publisher might get paid. The following are terms that will be explained in detail later. The first is PPC or Pay Per Click. Second is PPA or Pay Per Action or Acquisition. And third is PPS or Pay Per Sale.

What is Pay Per Click?

Pay Per Click is exactly that. When a user clicks on the merchant’s ad that has been placed on the affiliate’s website, blog or in their emails, that affiliate gets paid. Now in a ppc campaign the amount the affiliate gets paid is usually a small amount, somewhere from a few cents to a few dollars per clicked ad. Good affiliate programs have fraud prevention measures in place to keep ads from getting clicked by people just for the sake of clicking ads to run up numbers. Vita Marketing Group uses such fraud prevention measures for all of our campaigns.

What is Pay Per Action?

A user clicks an ad that is on the affiliates site. The user is then taken to a form to fill out for more information regarding the product or service provided. Once the submit button is clicked on the form by the user this is considered the desired action or acquisition by the merchant. As long as all the information checks out that was submitted by the user the affiliate will get paid for that submitted form. The information must be legitimate. In other words if an email was to be provided by the user then there has to be a valid email, or some other means of contact address, phone number etc. Again there are fraud prevention measures in place to discourage users from fraudulently filling out forms. This type of program generally pays more than PPC but less than pay per sale.

What is Pay Per Sale?

Yep you guessed it. When a user clicks on the merchant’s ad which has been placed on the affiliate’s site and that click results in a sale, the affiliate gets paid. Now usually if there are more products that what was advertised the affiliate will get paid regardless of what is purchased. The affiliate will also get paid on reoccurring purchases as well by that same user, if the program has been set up that way. There are several ways a program can be set up depending on the nature of the product or services offered by the merchant. Typically this can be the most lucrative for the affiliate and the safest for the merchant. Why? Because the merchant pays nothing unless something gets sold, but the pay out is generally higher because of this. A commission will usually run between 10% to 50% of the sale. I have even seen some programs pay as high as 60% to super affiliates.

Why do I need an affiliate program for my business?

An affiliate marketing program can be a great way to market your products or services for one main reason. You can choose not to pay out until the desired action (as described above) of your program is achieved. Of course if you want good affiliates that are worth their salt promoting your products or services you need to make it worth it for them. I don’t know of any other advertising medium where you can choose not to pay until you get the desired results you are looking for. Can you get this in print advertising? I THINK NOT!