Affiliate marketing is a strategy that employs commission based salespeople on the net. It is supposed to be effortless program for advertiser, since the program depends on affiliate partners to handle all tasks for marketing.

Since affiliates are free to choose marketing tactics, variety of promotion scheme is used by participating partners. Popular marketing tactics are from banner advertising, Paid Placement, Paid inclusion to email marketing.

While advertisers are not involved in marketing and sales, they still have to manage affiliate accounts for keeping track of performance and payment. Hiring affiliate management service to handle partner accounts is worthwhile because it is no trivial task and time consuming. Alternatively, you can use affiliate program software to manage participating accounts.

Affiliate marketing is performance based.

Affiliate marketing is performance based program by nature. Sales teams in the affiliate network work for commission. Because it is result based, anyone can easily sign up as a publisher and the network can grow fast in the web. It is this reason why affiliate marketing is powerful for advertisers who are willing to pay for committed sales.

Challenge of Affiliate marketing

Once affiliate program starts, you realize soon that company’s sales team and affiliate partners compete against each other for advertising and marketing. For examples, you will see affiliate web sites compete against company’s for search ranking and pricing as well. Thus, it is best for the advertiser to determine sales and search engine marketing policy before announcing the program to the affiliate marketing. A typical policy for search engine marketing is to prohibit affiliates from marketing branded keywords.

Another challenge is that a number of affiliates use spam to attract customers or direct the traffic. Since a company associated with unethical web activity runs the risk for having web site removed from search ranking, it is your best interest to prevent this from happening to your affiliate partners.