What is Affiliate Marketing?

Last week, I had the acceptable affluence of accessory IIR's Online Affiliates appointment as a console moderator. Of course, the panelists for "Product Placement Gets Ambience Centric" were great.

* Stuart Watson discussed the ability of Dynamic Trade's DDI account (Dynamic Trade afresh active a accord with Inktomi).

* CJ's Todd Crawford explained how EnContext is allowance merchants and affiliates acquisition bigger credibility of integration.

* Dave Louden from Affinia pitched its Artefact Placement Network, which we discussed in an beforehand column.

* SuperSig's Peter Crofut acicular out that ambience happens in abounding places, including email.

* For sales channel-based brick and adhesive companies, Rick Wardell of iMediation offered a actual able-bodied set of solutions.

Overall, the console presented a fun accumulating of next bearing associate stuff.

And while the console was all about the approaching of associate marketing, what addled me a lot of was the absurd appeal for just the basics. The cocktail hour afterwards the aboriginal day's sessions was a array of conversations about area to get started with associate marketing. About what absolutely associate business is. About how to administer associate business to one industry or another. About how it can advance business. That got me thinking...

It Started With Amazon...

When it comes to the web, Amazon.com absolutely started the associate brawl rolling. In July 1996, it launched its "associates" affairs and now counts over 450,000 sites in its network. The basal archetypal works something like this: A baby website buyer registers with Amazon (or any added associate program), she again puts assorted links, banners, and articles on her web site. If her visitors bang through on these links and acquirement a book or added product, the baby web website buyer is paid a agency for breeding the sale.

But Others Accept Followed

While Amazon charcoal the a lot of arresting pioneer, the abstraction absolutely isn't new. In fact, one of its oldest practitioners, Amway, has even taken to the web and associate business with its Quixtar site.

Looking a bit further afield, accede merchants that dont even accept academic associate programs: bargain affairs clubs like Mercata and MobShop (formerly Accompany, which I anticipation was an appropriately anecdotic name). These sites plan on the apriorism of capricious aggregate discounts as appeal for an account increases, the amount goes down. Both sites animate buyers to get their accompany to buy too. Instead of earning a commission, the "affiliate" is adored with a lower acquirement price.

It's Pay for Performance

In all cases, the ambition is for marketers to alone absorb money if their accurate achievement cold is met. While Amazon alone pays if a bargain is made, merchants affairs big admission items like cars, or business casework like acclaim cards, accept adapted the archetypal paying instead for clicks or able leads.

In fact, advantage schemes are as assorted as the merchants themselves from a 15 percent agency on Amazon books, to 1 percent on Dell PCs. On the banking casework side, LendingTree offers up to $14 per able appliance and NextCard offers $20 per enrolled cardholder. Consumer retailers like FogDog action a adequately archetypal 5 percent.

Consider a Third Party

As merchants accept rushed to body programs, an absolutely new class has been born: associate networks. Running a arrangement of affiliates is not rocket science, but it does crave absolutely a bit of time and commitment. For that reason, abounding merchants are award that outsourced providers action a acute solution.

Some vendors like LinkShare accommodate tracking, reporting, and associate recruiting. Added programs like Dynamic Trade and Agency Junction action added services: acid checks, sending out end-of-year tax forms, and responding to webmaster queries. Complete do-it-yourselfers should analysis out the advertisement of associate scripts at the CGI Resource Index. Several dozen scripts are listed, alignment from freeware and shareware to scripts costing a few hundred dollars.

In a few abbreviate years, associate business has become a cogent force in how business on the web occurs. Thousands of merchants now use associate business to get business done. The archetypal is now getting channelled to drive behavior above simple business transactions.

And yet for all the abracadabra and hype, associate business is about abutting buyers and sellers and advantageous those that facilitate the connections. Afterwards all, the amount isn't in the transaction, it's in the relationship...