Affiliate marketing has grown in popularity over the years as a cost-effective way to grow your business. Today, 6/7 brands incorporate affiliate programs into their marketing strategies. This strategy is especially beneficial for small businesses as it allows them to increase brand awareness and sales with minimal effort and a lower budget. It is pay-per-transaction, which allows businesses to lower advertising costs and tap into a larger market.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing allows companies to pay third-party publishers to generate leads or traffic to their products and services. Affiliates are third-party publishers. The commission fee encourages them to promote the company.

Types of affiliate marketing?

There are three types of affiliate marketing: related affiliate marketing, unattached marketing and involved marketing.

1. Unattached affiliate marketing: This model of advertising is free from any connection to the product/service they promote. They do not have any expertise or knowledge in the product or service they are promoting and cannot make claims or be considered experts. This type of affiliate marketing is the least involved. Affiliates are free from any obligation to recommend or advise if they have no attachment to the product and customer.

2. Related Affiliate Market: As the name implies, related affiliate marketing is the promotion of products and services by affiliates with some kind of relationship to the offering. The connection between the affiliate and the product/service is generally the most important. Because the affiliate is trusted and has sufficient authority and influence to drive traffic, they are also highly respected. However, the affiliate does not make any claims regarding the service or product.

3. Involved affiliate marketing: This type of marketing creates a stronger connection between the affiliates and the product or services they promote. They are familiar with the product, have used it or are currently using it and feel confident that others will benefit from their positive experiences. They are trusted sources of information and their experiences are the advertising. However, they may lose their reputation if there are any issues with the offering.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing can yield great rewards for the advertising company and the affiliate marketer. The company benefits from low-cost advertising and the creative marketing efforts of its affiliates, and the affiliate benefits by earning additional income and incentives. The return on investment for affiliate marketing is high as the company only pays on traffic converted to sales. The cost of advertising, if any, is borne by the affiliate.

The advertising company sets the terms of an affiliate marketing program. Early on, companies largely paid the cost per click (traffic) or cost per mile (impressions) on banner advertisements. As technology evolved, the focus turned to commissions on actual sales or qualified leads. The early affiliate marketing programs were vulnerable to fraud because clicks could be generated by software, as could impressions.

Now, most affiliate programs have strict terms and conditions on how to generate leads. There are also certain banned methods, such as installing adware or spyware that redirect all search queries for a product to an affiliate’s page. Some affiliate marketing programs go as far as to lay out how a product or service is to be discussed in the content before an affiliate link can be validated.

So an effective affiliate marketing program requires some forethought. The terms and conditions must be clearly spelled out, especially if the contract agreement pays for traffic rather than sales. The potential for fraud in affiliate marketing is possible.

Unscrupulous affiliates can squat on domain names with misspellings and get a commission for the redirect. They can populate online registration forms with fake or stolen information, and they can purchase AdWords on search terms the company already ranks high on, and so on. Even if the terms and conditions are clear, an affiliate marketing program requires that someone monitor affiliates and enforce rules.

In exchange, however, a company can access motivated, creative people, to help sell their products or services to the world.

Benefits of Joining Affiliate Networks?

• One of the easiest method of earning
• Choice the product you wish to promote
• Better rewards and incentives
• Help sellers to grow their business

List of Top 10 Affiliates Marketing Websites

1. Amazon Associates

Amazon associate is number one affiliate marketing website which is best for flexible commission structure and brand support. You can easily sign up for Amazon associate program and start promoting their product.

2. Share A Sale

Share A sale is also a popular affiliate marketing website that provide good tracking and reporting features

3. MaxBounty

MaxBounty is one of the leading affiliate marketing network which provide great commissions to their affiliators.

4. Commission Junction ( CJ )

Commission junction ( CJ ) is best affiliate network known for creative and innovative Tech that meets client needs.

5. Impact

Impact which is the California based best affiliate marketing network which is getting popular day by day.

6. Avangate

Avangate is also very popular global affiliate marketing network. This website mainly promotes software and digital goods.

7. Partner Stack

Partner stack is also one of the best affiliate marketing network if you want to do promotion for business to business softwares and saas softwares.

8. Click Bank

Clickbank is one of the most popular affiliate marketing site used by number of affiliators globally. Clickbank paid good amount of commission to their affiliators.

9. Flexoffers

Flex offers is best performance based marketing platform who provide best Marketing solution for both advertiser and publishers.

10. JVzoo

JVzoo in this business from past 10 years. This is a kind of platform that help businessman to grow their business online.