At its heart, affiliate marketing is just an agreement, nothing more. A merchant comes along with a product, and they want to drive more sales, so they make an agreement with a website owner.
This agreement lays out terms that go something along of: I place ads in view of your site’s organic traffic, if you can get people to interact with my ads, then I will pay you.
Exactly how the payment works is determined in the affiliate agreement, but there are a few common ones, such as pay-per-view, pay-per-click, pay-per-sale, and so on.
Affiliate marketing is performance based marketing. If the website owner wants to be paid, they need people to click on the ads or buy products.
The Four Pillars of Affiliate Marketing
This is affiliate marketing 101.
The kind of stuff you rack up a massive student debt learning from some old guy in a stripy, tucked in shirt.
There are four pillars of affiliate marketing and simply put, they go as follows.
• Merchant
• Publisher
• Customer
• Network
It’s pretty simple. Merchants have products or services to sell, publishers have blogs or other high-traffic websites they want to monetize, and customers are the target audience for the products.
The network is simply a means to link merchants to publishers and enforce affiliate contracts to prevent one from scamming the other.
When everything is working as it should, the merchant has a product that the publisher can show to their readers, and the readers can enrich their life by purchasing the product, becoming customers.
Everyone wins.
This isn’t always how it works, but in a perfect world (and for the best outcome for everyone involved) this is the model that you should strive for.
In this course, we look specifically at an affiliate marketing networks, because like most things that the stripy-shirt man teaches, the rest is self-explanatory.
An affiliate network on the other hand is exciting because they are a potential source of income for a blogger, or a website owner looking to monetize their site.
