The first player in the affiliate marketing game is the affiliate network. The network provides the merchants a place to advertise their websites, and products, and also to recruit affiliates. The network will also charge the merchant a set up fee, to sell and advertise in their network.
The affiliate network may also help the merchant process their product automatically, giving the merchant their profit, and the network usually charges a processing fee,for example, your product sells for $50, the network processing fee might be 1% to 2% of the $50. The network also pays the affiliates their commissions, by check ,or direct deposit, and he or she may receive their check weekly, bi weekly, or monthly, depending on the network.
The second player in the affiliate marketing game is the merchant. Companies like WalMart, Netflix, or Amazon and they are the ones who sell their products, and invite anybody whose interested, in signing up with them, and paying them a commission for referring people to their website.
The reason these companies recruit affiliates, is so that they can get free traffic, and free advertising to their website.
The third player in this marketing game is the affiliate. This is anyone who signs up under one of the merchants like Walmart, Netflix , or Amazon. The affiliates job is to attract traffic to these merchants websites using a variety of methods like SEO, Pay Per Click advertising, and article marketing.
The fourth player in this marketing game is the consumer.The consumer is the person who the affiliate refers to the merchants website. The consumer then makes the decision on whether, he or she, wants the product, the merchant is selling.
In conclusion, I hope this gives you a basic overview of who the four players are in the affiliate marketing game, and how this business works.
