Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketing is a popular web-based marketing practice in which you reward one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by your affiliate's marketing program.

Affiliate marketing widens the scope of your internet presence by encouraging other websites to become advocates for your services, increasing your online exposure and improving the efficiency of your advertising spend. This "pay-for-performance" model is in essence the modern version of the "finders'-fee" model, where individuals who introduce new clients to a business are compensated. The difference in the case of affiliate marketing is that advertisers only pay their publishers when the new client introduction results in a sale or a lead, making it a low-risk, high-reward environment for both parties.

Affiliate marketing has transformed into an industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including:

• Affiliate networks
• Affiliate management companies
• In-house affiliate managers
• Specialized 3rd party vendors
• Various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners. 

Affiliate marketing - An effective web marketing tool

Affiliate marketing is a solid and very effective web marketing tool. The strength of this type of marketing lies in the indirect nature of the websites through which partnerships are formed. The affiliate builds traffic by carefully addressing the individual interests of each user and tailoring their content to potential customers' needs and expectations, before delivering a call to action through to your site.

Because the visitors that come to your site are already pre-disposed to your offering, they are more likely to purchase. Thanks to affiliate marketing the visitor that lands on your site is already pre-qualified!

Contacts generated via affiliate marketing are often all the more valuable because they derive from domains in which your company would have difficulty reaching through traditional advertising channels.