It all started in the 90’s when the fascinating technology of the World Wide Web started. This gave commercial organizations another way to reach their target markets.

Some websites started to create valuable content and provided tremendous benefits to their visitors and naturally these website owners wanted to be compensated for their hard work. Early forms of online advertising like CPM or fixed placement started seeing competition from emerging, more accountable forms of online advertising, like affiliate marketing.

For an answer to what is affiliate marketing, in a nutshell, affiliate marketing is about relationships, a relationship between three parties which include: (a) Advertisers, (b) Publishers, and (c) Consumers.

Advertisers:

In the world of affiliate marketing, an advertiser is generally a company that is selling a product or services. There is a cost for advertisement in the case of affiliate marketing. All the advertisers who want to promote their business must be ready to pay other people who help them to sell their product or services.

Publishers:

One of the most important elements of the affiliate marketing triangle is the publisher who can be an individual, or a company. The publisher promotes advertiser’s products and or services in exchange for earning a commission. It is the responsibility of the advertiser to provide the publisher with creative such as links, banners or text etc. for him/her to incorporate these creative into his/her website.

Consumers:

The last element to complete the affiliate marketing triangle is the consumer. The consumer is the one who actually sees the ad and then makes an action (either by clicking a link or by submitting their information via a form) that takes them from the publisher’s website to the advertiser’s to complete the action, which we call a conversion.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]