Affiliate Marketing is a referral-based, revenue-sharing marketing strategy, in which you (a Merchant) pay your Affiliates a commission for referring business to your website.

You do not pay for advertising with their Affiliates - you only pay when a sale, lead, download, subscription or other desired action occurs.

An example
A webmaster signs up as a new affiliate in your HitPath powered affiliate network. He gets his affiliate login ID and username and password to be able to log in to the affiliate interface.

He then logs in to his affiliate administration page, and collects some marketing material for his site (including perhaps an email creative, couple of banners of varying sizes, specific links to use on search engine marketing, etc...). He then starts to market using this material.

A visitor open an email, banners, pop-up, click on a search result link in Google, etc... clicks through to your website. The visitor decides to purchase the product or sign up for services advertise on the website.

Your HitPath powered affiliate network then recognizes that the sale was referred by the affiliate, so it credits the affiliate's account with a commission.

How Can Affiliate Marketing Help Me?

Affiliate Marketing is a cost effective medium in which to deliver brand awareness on a pay-for-performance basis. It offers a low customer acquisition cost because you're paying only when visitors convert into customers/leads. Affiliate Marketing is a totally RISK FREE marketing medium for the advertiser since commissions only are paid after the visits are converted to actual sales or leads

With Affiliate Marketing, you can identify new markets that you may not have thought about in the past. Your affiliates can introduce your products and services to their niche markets using their own channels at no additional cost to your business. You may find out through an affiliate's success that there is an untapped market niche you have been neglecting.

Affiliate marketing can help you identify strategic partners. Remember, Affiliate Marketing isn't just for consumers. Business to business (B2B) Affiliate Marketing can help you find new B2B partners.

Through Affiliate Marketing, you can place your products and services where non-searchers will find them.

The Affiliate Marketing encyclopedia, Affilipedia.com , describes the terms merchant and affiliate in the following way:

Advertiser/Merchant is an online business that markets and sells goods or services. Advertisers/Merchants establish affiliate programs as a cost effective method to get consumers to purchase a product, register for a service, fill out a form, or visit a Web site.

Affiliate is a Web site owner that earns a commission for referring clicks, leads, or sales to an Advertiser/Merchant.

'Affiliate' is a group or person officially linked to an organization.

If you have a website on which you sell something or through which you accept leads and you'd like to pay other website owners, bloggers and email list owners for sending you sales or leads - you are an Advertiser/Merchant.

If you have a website, a blog or an email list that you'd like to use to generate interest in specific merchants, products or services and you'd like to earn commissions by sending your contacts to those merchants - you are an affiliate.

If you are still asking yourself whether you're a Advertiser/Merchant or an affiliate, you may actually be both. There are several Advertisers/Merchants that have affiliate programs, receive traffic from affiliates, give affiliates commissions for the transactions they refer AND they themselves refer traffic to other Advertisers/Merchants in return for commissions on the transactions made by those visitors.

Advertisers/Merchants can get started here at HitPath.com. Give us a call to hear how affiliate marketing will work for you and how the HitPath software can help you meet your online marketing revenue goals.