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The growth of internet technology over the years has greatly affected every aspect of human lives. If there is something that got the most influence is it is how people do business today. With great impact on communications, mobilization, remote selling and online payment processing, businesses are waging war against each other on their own niche as to who gets the most audience of potential buyers of their products and services.

But like any other war, he who gets the most allies is almost always guaranteed of victory. With this same principle, businesses came up with a brilliant solution – collaborative web advertising marketing called “Affiliate Marketing”.

Affiliate Marketing is a form of web advertising that involves the method of promoting one’s site, products or services via third party partners known as “affiliates” or “partners”.

The usual and most basic idea behind affiliate marketing is to drive traffic from one web site into another for the purpose of improving its organic search engine optimization. Merchants, also known as “publishers” provide banner ads or text link ads to their affiliate partners in the form of “backlinks”.
 
Backlinks, as the word implies, are images or link texts that links back to the original website (or the site being promoted). This principle can be traced back to Google’s policy of measuring a site’s popularity by the number of other sites linking to it as opposed to Yahoo’s policy of counting the keyword density of the site’s pages.

Affiliate Marketing comes in different forms depending on the affiliate program being offered. Such programs include Pay per click (PPC) campaigns, Pay per action campaigns, link directories (often referred to as “link farms”), product reviews and comparison, blogs, coupon and rebates, RSS feeds, Email list (often used in spamming), popups, adware, spamware and other related means.

Among the top 3 affiliate networks today offering advertising opportunities for publishers and opportunity for webmasters aspiring to be affiliate partners to monetize their own site exists, each of which services are explained below:

Google Adwords/AdSense.

Google pay-per-click (PPC) affiliate advertising program is AdWords, an affiliate advertising using both text and banner ads of standard sizes. Publishers can set how much and how often ads are rotated to its affiliate partner’s websites and were being charged based on the number of clicks generated multiplied by the cost-per-click (CPC) set for the ad. Aspiring affiliate partners can enroll to the AdSense affiliate program and display contextual ads on their own sites.

Commission Junction.

Commission Junction (CJ), unlike Google, is a performance-based marketing solution that offers advertisers and affiliates pay only for results scheme with a 3 months deployment strategy support. Commissioning is item-based and reports can be customized on a specified reporting schedule. Advertisers can choose from multiple preset action rules as to when to credit their partners plus performance incentives for outstanding publishers.

LinkShare.

Linkshare holds over 10 million partnerships; the record by far in terms of the largest network of affiliate program partners. It is also the first affiliate network provider to achieve sustained profitability as affiliate marketing provider. The company claims as to being the pioneer in online affiliate marketing has the largest pay for performance affiliate marketing network on the Internet. Linkshare’s publishers include Fortune 500 and outstanding businesses such as J.C. Penney, 1-800-Flowers.com, American Express, Avon and Dell.

Online business nowadays is a fierce struggle of corporate survival and the only way to survive is to be visible within your business’ own niche. With the strict standards imposed by the search engines today, the only solution is to be in partner with as much number of already established sites, a strategy which can only be attained through affiliate marketing.

Tags: Advertising, Blogging for Profit, Keywords, Dollars, Make Money Online, Search Engines, Content Management, Adwords, Website, Web Master