What is Affiliate marketing ? You have a great product or service, but nobody knows about it. How do you find new customers? And how do they find you? The most common answers to these questions involve marketing and advertising campaigns ranging from small-scale approaches like putting fliers on cars in a parking lot, to multi-million-dollar commercials during the Super Bowl.

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What Is Affiliate Marketing?
You have a great product or service, but nobody knows about it. How do you find new
customers? And how do they find you?
The most common answers to these questions involve marketing and advertising campaigns ranging
from small-scale approaches like putting fliers on cars in a parking lot, to multi-million-dollar
commercials during the Super Bowl.
If you would like to learn more about affiliate marketing click here
Studies suggest that the average person is exposed to between three- to five thousand types of
advertisement each day. With so much information being blasted out, how can you be sure your
message is received?
Have you ever had a friend or family member tell you about a cool product or rave about some new

2. restaurant? Chances are you were more receptive to that information than from any amount of
advertising you may have seen or heard.
Even with all the flashy advertisements you may see in a single day, direct suggestions from a
trusted friend are more likely to spur you to investigate a new product as opposed to some
unsolicited advertisement during your daily commute.
Okay, but how do you get people to talk to their friends and family about your company’s products or
services? Enter affiliate marketing.
Wikipedia tells us that affiliate marketing is a method of promotion “in which a business rewards one
or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.”
This could be achieved either through procuring the aid of a recommended service or by self. So
what exactly does this mean? And how does it apply to business owners and consumers?
If you would like to learn more about affiliate marketing click here
Basic Affiliate Marketing
At the most basic level, affiliate marketing involves a company paying a commission or some other
bonus to a person (the affiliate) who understands effective customer engagement and promotes the
company to a friend or acquaintance who then becomes a new customer of that company.
As you can see, there are generally three key players in an affiliate marketing program:
The merchant (the person or company selling something)
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The affiliate (the person promoting the product)
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The customer (the person buying the product based on interaction with the affiliate)
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The affiliate is simply a customer telling his/her friends about a company, product, or service. As
that promotion generates sales, the company then thanks the affiliate by providing some sort of perk
or commission.
The customer is happy because they’ve discovered a product or service they hadn’t known about
before. The affiliate is happy because they’ve earned a bonus. And the company is happy because
they’ve increased sales with minimal marketing investment. It’s a win-win-win!
If you would like to learn more about affiliate marketing click here
Everyone is online
These days, spreading information via word of mouth is easier than ever. Rather than waiting to talk
about a company, service, or product in a face-to-face conversation, we can copy an internet address
and paste it into a personalized email, Facebook post, or tweet.
Almost everybody is online and virtually connected. Recent Facebook reports claim that more than
50% of the adult population in the US has a Facebook account and that nearly 60% of Facebook
users are connected to one hundred or more friends.
And chances are that if an individual is not connected to Facebook or another social network, they
live near or are closely associated with someone who is. Whether or not these figures are totally

3. accurate, they illustrate that most people are connected online in one way or another.
Taking it to the next level
As a person starts to see commissions, it’s likely they’ll be more motivated to expand their referral
process. An individual may even seek out affiliate marketing opportunities as a way to supplement
income.
Financially motivated individuals can take their affiliate marketing efforts to the next level by
recommending products or services through their own commercial web presence, whether that be a
professional blog, Facebook group, or multifaceted corporate web presence.
Trusted commercial Internet professionals can easily recommend products and services for another
company and increase revenue to both businesses – to one business through increased traffic and
sales and to the other through commissions generated through the affiliate program.
While personalized Facebook, Twitter, or email referrals will generally not extend beyond a person’s
friends or family, a commercially minded affiliate will seek out ways to extend the reach of his or her
referral link to as many people as possible, often referring customers he or she has never interacted
with directly.
Getting started
If you want to set up an affiliate marketing program, you’ll need to create and maintain a database
of your affiliates, create and track their unique links, and integrate those custom links into your e-
commerce process so you can pay them the appropriate commissions. Sound a bit daunting?
Fortunately there’s Easy Affiliate—a full-featured plugin that helps you almost effortlessly launch an
affiliate program on your WordPress site in just a matter of minutes. If you have a product or service
along with any sort of online presence, chances are good that affiliate marketing will work for you.
With just a few short clicks, you could have a free-form marketing team of affiliates working for you,
driving your sales in ways you hadn’t thought possible.
What are your thoughts about affiliate marketing? Tell us what you think in the comments section.