An affiliation platform is an intermediate website connecting advertisers eager to promote their products or services on the Net, and affiliates who will be the promoters of these products.
In addition to being the intermediate between advertisers and affiliates, the affiliation platform also manages a program of payment which allows each affiliate to be remunerated according to their performances.
Mainly these models of payment also called campaigns. Types are structured as follows:
CPA - Commissions expressed as a percentage - Hybrid (CPA + commission) + or fixe payments.
Affiliation platforms are often used by online advertisers, especially for the gambling market, since the payments can be made according to the results and the quality of players brought by the affiliate. To quote only one example, ACF-Webmaster, is a well-known platform in the gambling industry.
Types of affiliate websites
Affiliate websites are often categorized by merchants (i.e., advertisers) and affiliate networks. There are currently no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorization. The following types of websites are generic, yet are commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers.
- Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers' offers (i.e., search arbitrage)
- Comparison shopping websites and directories
- Loyalty websites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back
- CRM sites that offer charitable donations
- Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions
- Content and niche market websites, including product review sites
- Personal websites
- Weblogs and website syndication feeds
- E-mail list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in -mail lists that typically employ e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more content-heavy
- Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website
- Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparisons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates
- Cost per action networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated to their own network of affiliates
- Websites using adbars (e.g. Adsense) to display context-sensitive, highly relevant ads for products on the site
- Virtual Currency: a new type of publisher that utilizes the social media space to couple an advertiser's offer with a handout of "virtual currency" in a game or virtual platform.
- Video Blog: Video content which allows viewers to click on and purchase products related to the video's subject.
- File-Sharing: Web sites that host directories of music, movies, games and other software. Users upload content (usually in violation of copyright) to file-hosting sites, and then post descriptions of the material and their download links on directory sites. Uploaders are paid by the file-hosting sites based on the number of times their files are downloaded. The file-hosting sites sell premium download access to the files to the general public. The web sites that host the directory services sell advertising and do not host the files themselves.
Market Affilation
Affiliate marketing or Market Affilation is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network, the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third parties vendors.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization(SEO), paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.
