How Affiliate Marketing works?
To understand Affiliate marketing even better , you have to look on below image.
The above image clearly describes the process of affiliate marketing. Each step is explained clearly below.
1. Affiliate is the one who promotes advertiser’s products through merchant’s (or advertiser’s) affiliate program. There are lot of affiliate programs so one can register with that and get unique affiliate link. Some of the affiliate programs are
https://affiliate-program.amazon.in/gp/associates/join/landing/main.html
2. Affiliate uses affiliate link to mention merchant’s website in his blog or website. Promotions can be done through blogs, websites, you tube videos, Facebook, emails and other methods.
3.Visitor visits affiliate’s website.
4.Visitor clicks on affiliate link to visit merchant’s website. When online marketing is doing a lot of visitors visit to website thereby there are chances of visitors visiting merchant’s website.
5.When visitors clicks on affiliate link, a cookie has been stored into his web browser. Advertisers get to know about affiliate link from which visitor visit the site through this cookie.
6.Visitor completes some action in the merchant’s site like purchasing products, filling forms, entering his email address or whatever merchant wants to do in his website.
7.Once visitor completes some actions as said above the merchant checks the affiliate cookie stored in visitor’s computer.
8.Merchant finds information of affiliate and credits commission to affiliate according to affiliate agreement.
9.Merchant makes reports that contains all the visitors and sales that affiliate has done from the affiliate link.
10.Affiliate program will send payment to affiliate at the end of payment period. Usually the payment period is one month.
This is how the affiliate program actually works.