Affiliates - The Other Source Of Income


by Kanquona Bhattacharjee - Date: 2007-05-21 - Word Count: 562 Share This!

In modern era, web presence is what everybody looks for. It's the quickest way to get oneself acquainted with. For businesses, web presence gives a perfect insight to the intended visitors about the range of products they are selling; leave aside the sales they generated online. When you have already made your footsteps in the World Wide Web or are preparing for it, why not you try one perfect way of making money online. Yes, it is the affiliate program. It's beneficial for who are owning the service as well as who subscribes.

In single sentence, Affiliate Program is a kind of web promotion in which the publisher (subscriber) gets rewarded by the owner for every visitor, enquiry or sales generated from it.

An affiliate program works in this manner. An owner decides to run an affiliate business. The intention is solely guided by marketing strategy. To explain it better, lets take a brief look at the real world, outside of virtual domain. In real world, one promotes business through advertising, mainly electronic ads, print ads, hoarding, banner. Now, think of a case. You own a shop and the business puts a hoarding inside your shop. The condition is that, if any customer of yours, enquires of the hoarding and goes to buy the product with your reference, you will get a percentage of profit or a commission from it. This is the exact idea of affiliate program. You publish the program owners' advertisement in your website and if any visitors of yours, clicks on that banner or text ad, get redirected to the owner's website, you are the gainer in terms of money. Isn't it very interesting?

Let me move into finer details and some technicalities, pros and cons of this unique way of money production.

In brief an affiliate program can be subdivided into two classes. viz Cost per sale and cost per action; where cost per sale is predominant. Pay per click is in the other side, rightly dominated by search engines. In cost per sale, you only get benefited if the visitor actually buys anything in the owner website while in cost per action you get benefited for every action of visitors who redirected to the affiliate program owner.

Almost all search engines now run an affiliate program where one pays the search engine for top listing. The search engine then displays the result based on the search context in a separate space of the search result. The idea is, if you want to place your advertisement in the pay zone, then you need to deposit a sum of money with the search engine. Now when, the query runner clicks on the advertisement, an amount gets deducted from your account. Other than the search engine, one can publish the result in her website too. In that case the advertisement will appear as per the website context and the publisher will earn money per click. This is the main idea behind pay per click program.

A caveat is that the authenticity, security and unwanted use or restriction of the program depends a lot on the ability of the software. But more or less before release, this aspect is scrutinized most. I must say, since its inception in 1996 claimed to be by Amazon, affiliate program has grown up as a mature utility which is bliss for the business as well as for the publisher.

Happy Affiliating


Related Tags: affiliate program, internet marketing

Kanquona Bhattacharjee is a freelance writer and bloger. She has completed her post graduation in English from the University of Calcutta. She has some deep insight into social problems and often present these infront of the most strongest medium. Her personal blog is http://journeytolearning.blogspot.com/ . She can be contacted at kanquona@gmail.com

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