What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a form of revenue generation through the placement of advertising material in digital channels for the offers of a seller (merchant). In the simplest case, this is an external link to a store or a product. However, the possibilities range all the way to elaborate advertising media. The link provider or publisher receives a commission, whereby "pay-per-sale", "pay-per-lead" or "pay-per-click" are common remuneration methods. This means that if a visitor goes from the publisher website to the affiliate partner and makes a purchase there, for example, the publisher receives a commission.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Affiliate marketing is a form of performance marketing. There are various affiliate or partner programs where merchants and publishers are brought together, e.g. affilinet, Zanox or amazon. What they all have in common is that when a visitor clicks on an affiliate link, a cookie is stored in their browser so that a subsequent purchase can be assigned to a specific publisher or affiliate. Depending on how the payment is made, the publisher is remunerated after a certain period of time.
Advantages of affiliate marketing
The advantages for the merchant, or advertiser, are the relatively low costs, as commissions only have to be paid if the merchant is successful and has already earned money. Until then, they receive free advertising space on the Internet, usually in a well-meaning referral context, when the respective product is advertised on the publisher's site.
One of the advantages for the publisher is the relatively low cost of content creation, as the affiliate partner provides advertising material that the publisher can use on their website. In addition, the publisher ideally receives ongoing remuneration for content created once. The prerequisite for this is a certain amount of traffic on the publisher's site and visitors who actually convert.
Further references:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-Marketing
https://www.gruenderszene.de/lexikon/begriffe/affiliate-marketing
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