J Motives

Consumer: Finally, you have the consumer or the party that will be (hopefully) buying your product. Thus, the relationship between the affiliate and the consumer should be one of trust. The consumer finishes out the relationship triangle by interacting with your marketing efforts (like clicking a tracked URL or ad) and then moving further into the publisher’s sales funnel. Once they’ve bought something or completed the action agreed upon by the affiliate and merchant, everyone receives their piece of the exchange. All three groups center on the relationship created by the affiliate and will receive their product or payment through you. Of course, you’ll also get paid when a purchase goes through.

Affiliate: The second party is the publisher, more commonly referred to as the affiliate marketer. This is you, the individual working with the merchant to sell in exchange for a commission. You’ll have a contract in place, and you’ll seek to push traffic in the form of links, ads, or in some cases unique phone numbers that you incorporate on your site. The Advertiser/Affiliate relationship is a highly strategic one, as both parties need to make money for the relationship to continue. Since you’re working so closely, you need to be on the same page about your roles, responsibilities, and payment.

Advertiser: The first party, typically referred to as the advertiser or merchant, is the party that’s selling the actual product or service. This is the party that you, the affiliate, will be working with. They usually have an established affiliate program, and leave it to you to carve out your space on the web and sell their product. The product or service could be a physical product like phones or laptops, or even less tangible items like insurance policies. We’ll cover many more possibilities and examine how to choose products wisely in a later chapter.

Your overall success requires building relationships that rely on three distinct parties:

Affiliate marketing is a way for you to earn money by selling a brand’s products. As strictly a marketer, you have no inventory and work for commission. Generally, affiliate marketers receive payment when a consumer they referred buys a product or service or completes a specific task.

Affiliate marketing is an advertising method used by brands to attempt to mitigate wasteful spending in their marketing budget. It can be frustrating for a business to pay thousands for clicks or impressions only to win a handful of customers.

What is affiliate marketing

Affiliate Marketing Glossary 1 - Earnings Per Click (EPC) To calculate EPC, simply divide your total revenue by total clicks on your affiliate links (ie HopLinks on ClickBank). 2 - Average Order Value (AOV) Total revenue / # of initial orders. As a seller in the ecommerce space, your average order value (AOV) is a crucial metric in gauging the overall health of your offer. 3 - Lifetime Value (LTV) AOV * # of orders per year * average retention time in years. 4 - Cost Per Action (CPA) An affiliate marketing commission model centered around “cost per sale. 5 - Clickthrough Rate (CTR) # of clicks / # of visitors on a webpage. 6 - Conversion Rate # of buyers / # of visitors who saw an offer. 7 - Tracking Links A special URL that tracks behaviors, such as clicks or purchases. 8 - One Time Offer (OTO) An additional offer presented in an order flow. 9 - Landing Page The main sales page for a seller. 10 - Affiliate - A business owner or entrepreneur who promotes products or services for a third party in exchange for a commission, typically offered for new sales or leads. 11 - Affiliate link - An affiliate link is a specific type of tracking link that you can generate from a seller to promote their offer. This can be a text link or an image link. (Also see “HopLink”) 12 - Affiliate marketing – An industry built around the model of selling products through affiliates. Each time an affiliate makes a sale for a seller or brand, the affiliate will receive a commission. 13 - Affiliate network – A company that oversees affiliate relationships for a number of other companies, managing functions such as technology, recruitment, tracking, payments, etc. This is similar to the idea of an affiliate marketplace, but not identical. 14 - Attribution – The concept of attribution applies to all of marketing as a way to determine which marketing channels provided value in making new sales or growing revenue. For example, you can use a tracking link to see how many sales came from an email. 15 - Average Payout Value (APV) – The average commission amount you get paid for each sale as an affiliate. 16 - Banner ad – An image-based Internet advertisement that can be placed on an affiliate’s website. 17 - Commission – The payout an affiliate receives in exchange for promoting a seller’s product. 18 - Commission Rate – The standard rate a seller pays their affiliates in exchange for an offer promotion. 19 - Conversion – Describes the completion of a specific goal online. Examples of conversion goals include new email subscribers, new opportunities or leads, and new sales or customers. 20 - Cookie – A text file that is stored in a browser for a specified period of time (ie cookie duration) in order to hold information such as last date visited. Cookies are used to track unique IDs in the affiliate marketing world. 21 - Cookie Duration – The amount of time a cookie will give credit to an affiliate for purchases made from a specific customer. 22 - CPM – Cost per mille (CPM) - how much you have to pay to get your display ad or text ad viewed one thousand times. In this case, the CPM is paid out based on impressions, rather than clicks or sales. 23 - First Click – This type of attribution in affiliate marketing gives credit to the affiliate who first referred a customer to an offer. 24 - JV – A joint venture(JV) partnership is just that: a partnership between two or more parties in an affiliate marketing venture. 25 - Impression – An impression is a single view of your ad, video, or webpage. Impressions are a useful way to measure things like conversion rate (how many people took an action compared to total impressions on a page), and they’re also used in the CPM model for pricing. 26 - Last click – This type of attribution in affiliate marketing gives credit to the affiliate who last referred a customer to an offer. 27 - Lead – A lead is a sales contact, prospect, or potential customer, often pursued by businesses that sell high-ticket products or custom services.

Before we go any further, we need to know the meaning of terms in affiliate marketing