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Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.
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, 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 all the big players Google Yahoo etc have affiliates that are making money promoting thier products and services its just a like a commission only sales force.

In addition to these three factors, the report also finds that more than two-thirds (68%) of affiliate respondents say the affiliate technology also plays a role in helping them decide whether to join a particular program.
The top three technologies cited in the survey by affiliates are Commission Junction, LinkShare and Google Affilliate Network. Custom landing pages and a product feed via the affiliate technology are among the most valuable technology offerings for affiliates when promoting an affiliate program.
The report, which is free until Dec. 12, 2008, details findings from a first-of-its-kind survey that collected information about affiliates’ experiences in the affiliate marketing space, and was designed to help develop and evaluate marketing best practices for affiliates.
Additional survey findings:
“We were hoping to uncover practical information about affiliates and their experiences by conducting this survey, and we were not disappointed,” said Chris Kramer, media director and co-founder at NETexponent. “We definitely feel like members of the affiliate community will be able to use this information to their benefit and that we’ve been able to give back to the industry by coordinating this survey and contributing to the effort to continually learn more about affiliate marketing, as well as develop and reinforce marketing best practices.”
About the survey: The survey, which included 450 responses, was conducted earlier this year. It included 23 questions about topics such as experiences with different types of ad performance, site visitor demographics, technology and communication preferences, reasons for joining an affiliate program, experiences with emerging technology, and more. AffiliateBenchmarks and NETexponent publicized the survey by directly contacting known affiliates, publishing a press release, and promoting the survey on websites and blogs.
