When it comes to the structure of affiliate marketing, it is not too complicated and there are four players that have the key roles. These are the merchant, also called ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’, the network which makes the offers available to the customers to chose from and which processes the payments, the publisher who is in this case ‘the affiliate’, and, finally, the customer. Up until today, this kind of marketing has grown so much that it also involves another set of players, a secondary one. These include entities such as super-affiliates, third-party vendors and affiliate management agencies who support the overall trading process.
Since the affiliates use advertising methods that are regular and they do that quite often, the affiliate marketing is also often related to internet marketing to a certain extent. The methods that are quite frequently used are SEO or (organic) search engine optimization, e-mail marketing and search engine marketing. However, the affiliates sometimes opt for some other methods and techniques. For instance, they may publish a fake review of a product or a service that a partner offers.
Further on, people often tend to confuse affiliate marketing with referral marketing. In fact, both these forms have third parties as key players who are responsible for driving the sales to the merchant. Anyway, the main difference between these two is that the affiliate marketing drives sales by using financial motivation of their affiliates only, whereas with the referral marketing it is based on personal relationships and trust.
Anyway, advertisers actually still overlook affiliate marketing quite often. In fact, e-mail and search engines attract much more attention of the online merchants while affiliate marketing is not so prominent. However, affiliate marketing still has a very important position in the strategies of online merchants and, as mentioned before, it is growing day by day gaining more and more customers worldwide.
To sum up, affiliate marketing is one of the many types of online marketing. Although it has been present for a long time, its popularity is yet to grow. In fact, it is not a complicated type of trading at all and it can turn out to be quite lucrative. Its many options allow for the merchants to display their products or services in many admiring ways and it allows for the customers to research and chose the products they think are the best choice for them. However, affiliate marketing is yet to grow and show its potential.