When a consumer thinks of buying a product or service (doesn’t matter costly or mid-range), they usually first check out the reviews on the shopping sites. If they do not find a satisfactory product review, they start scouring the internet for blogs and honest user experiences. Often bloggers recommend products and items by promoting them on their blogs. This is called affiliate marketing.

Here in the blogger or affiliate earns a share of profit from a company for promoting or recommending their item on their page or website. The company profits by getting more customers. This is a win-win for both the companies and the affiliate marketer. In this scenario the business owner doesn’t have to spend any money nor pay anything to the affiliate until and unless there is a real sale. All the affiliate has to do is register with the parent company and generate a unique affiliate ID that tracks their analytics, conversion, clicks and incomes. This is a pretty simple yet mind blowing marketing gimmick that was ever invented. It is highly effective too. Suppose you buy a product after reading a recommendation on a website. It improves your life. You go back to the trusted website again and check for other recommendations. This builds a relationship of trust not only between a customer and affiliate marketer but also with the company or business involved at the end point.

Amazon is an example of a retail giant that benefits a lot from affiliate marketing. Other reputed companies which pay really well to their affiliates are Bluehost and Grammarly.

There is a famous quote that goes with affiliate marketing “Make money while you sleep!” and it’s true to its very word. Here the marketer earns rewards which can be in cash, kind, discount coupons, credits and more just by simply embedding the company’s affiliate links on their sites or pages. Every time a consumer clicks on this link and is transported to the product page, a cookie gets stored on the customer’s website. If the customer makes the purchase, this cookie calculates the reward points for the affiliate marketer. Companies like Amazon have cookie periods of 90 days! That means if a customer buys a product within 90 days of using an affiliate’s link, the marketer still makes money.

Affiliate marketing is a rapidly growing industry right now because of its creative tools, analytical techniques and the offerings it brings on the table for the marketer.

Here the onus is on the marketer to think of creative ways to launch the item, make it attractive to the buyer, find creative channels to make it more glamorous. The company doesn’t have to put much effort into sales but only give a small share from the product profit to the affiliate marketer.

As affiliate websites don’t require any special management nor are they time consuming, they are an ingenious way to boost the company’s sales. All the company has to take care of is that their promoters are using legal means to run their affiliate links. It’s needless to say that content plays a huge role in affiliate marketing, if the affiliate marketer can sell a product in a captivating mannerism and weave it in such a way that the recommendation doesn’t seem too pushy but natural.