What is Affiliate Marketing? How does it Work? [2023]

Introduction

In recent years, affiliate marketing, or performance marketing or affiliate marketing, has become one of the most important online marketing strategies for promoting a product or service. Also, on the advertiser’s part, it is an excellent tool to monetize a blog or a web page.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) placed this marketing branch in the mid-1990s. When Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, developed a technique that linked web pages of other sellers who were not interested in direct marketing their books to Amazon.

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What is Affiliates Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an online marketing strategy based on getting results. In it, an online shop or advertiser promotes its products or services by placing ads on its partners’ websites or blogs (aka publishers) through partner systems.

It allows the advertising company to expand its presence and reach a much wider audience than its website alone. And the affiliate, in turn, gets a commission for every marketing of a product or service they did through their link.

In most cases, affiliate marketing consists of these four leading players:

• Advertiser: the brand that wants to support its products or services.
• Affiliate or Publisher: Website or blog that helps other companies’ products or the advertiser’s services.
• Affiliate Program: It is a network that brings advertisers and affiliates together. The latter offer advertising space on their websites and social networks for a commission set by the advertising agency.
• End user: a person who buys the service. Always on the advertiser’s side, previously via a link or banner that the affiliate has on their website.

How does an Affiliate Program Work?

Now that you see affiliate marketing, do you want to know how an affiliate program works technically?

Affiliate marketing uses cookies to correctly track the information from the banners and links on the affiliate website. In this way, an affiliate program can know when a user has seen or clicked on a particular advertisement and stores all the information related to the visitor’s browser (date, time, and content visited).

In this way, every time a user clicks on a banner or an affiliate link and makes a purchase. On the advertiser’s website, the cookies can track all this information so that the affiliate program can identify the activities that are carried out and assign the commission that corresponds to the affiliate.

Main Affiliate Programs in Spain

Whether you are the owner of an eCommerce and you want to become an advertiser. You want to make your blog profitable and get extra money per month. Here I show you the main types of affiliate programs in Spain that may interest you:

• Awin: a new affiliate platform that landed very recently in Spain, joining Zanox and Affilinet. Two of Spain’s most used affiliate networks.
• Commission Junction: One of the most recognized affiliate platforms worldwide. It has a very intuitive and flexible user interface that will allow you to optimize and get the most out of your program.
• TradeTracker: It currently has more than 5,000 active programs and 250 advertisers from different sectors to be able to choose the category that best suits the content of your website or blog.
• Amazon affiliate system: The Amazon affiliate program is one of the most common among people who are dedicate to niche positioning or who have a community behind it in a format such as a blog or a newsletter.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing

The internet has increased the awareness of affiliate marketing. Amazon (AMZN) popularize this practice by creating an affiliate marketing program where websites and bloggers place links on Amazon’s page for a product being reviewed or discuss to receive a fee from advertising during a purchase. In this sense, affiliate marketing is a performance marketing program that outsources the sales process to an extensive network.

Affiliate marketing predates the internet, but analytics and cookies have made it a billion-dollar industry in digital marketing. A business running an affiliate marketing program can track which links bring in leads and see how many exchanges to sales through internal analytics.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is an advertising ideal in which a company pays third parties. To generate traffic or referrals to the company’s products and services. Third-party vendors are affiliates, and the commission rate incentivizes them to find ways to promote the business.

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