Affiliate Marketing- Part I

"A system of advertising in which site A agrees to feature buttons from site B, and site A gets a commission on any sales generated for site B. It can also be applied to situations in which an advertiser may be looking for marketing information, rather than a cash sale. Popular among startups with very small marketing budgets." This is what you get when you do a search in Google for the definition of Affiliate Marketing. I still remember, my early days of induction into the world of Internet Marketing, more specifically "Affiliate Marketing." Till then, I was completely oblivious to this term. For most of us, Affiliate marketing is a term that has different meanings. Let me first move to the other side of the line and say that affiliate marketing is nothing but unnecessary pop ups, newsletter spam, affiliate tracking code cloaking and much more. Now from the other side of the line, Affiliate Marketing is a way to market your products online by signing up affiliates who have websites and are willing to advertise your products on their site, in return earning a certain percentage of the commission from the sales they generate. If you take a closer look, for one particular product or a company, you will find server loads of affiliates, marketing the company or a product. Now this is an indicator to itself of the way you market your products on the Internet. To talk about Affiliate Marketing, this one article would not suffice. Hence, I have divided it into a series of articles. Although I am very tempted to first write about "The tools to improve an affiliate's conversions" let me stick to the chronology. Why does a company need an affiliate program? Having defined, affiliate marketing, the next obvious question that arises is, why a company needs affiliates when it can market its products on its own. To answer this, while a company may be very huge in terms of the infrastructure, or has a really successful product, it cannot sit silent and bank on its own strengths. Further to this, a company cannot customize the look and feel of the site to suit the tastes of the local markets. Although there are tools where you can cloak your website, it would involve a lot of complexity in terms of the technical and marketing demands. Hence, arises the need for affiliates. What makes a company look for affiliates? Let