One of the fastest and most successful ways to expand awareness of your company’s business is through the practice of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a strategy born of the World Wide Web, an effective method for gaining large-scale awareness of a company and its products and services, without investing the capital which is required of a typical marketing scheme.

Affiliate Marketing: Great for Small to Large Corporations

An affiliate marketing network can vary in size and scope and can be tailored to service the needs of just about any business. While affiliate marketing is typically used in small to medium sized, mainly Internet driven businesses, they may be an integral part of any sized business.

Affiliate marketing is a practice in web-based marketing where one site is used to drive traffic to another site. This raises product awareness by listing a single business on a myriad of sites, increasing market awareness of the targeted business. It takes the sole weight of marketing for a company off the shoulders of that company, and spreads the marketing responsibility to a number of agents.

Affiliate marketing works on an incentive program, so there are no up-front marketing costs for the company. Affiliates generally get a percentage or a specific monetary compensation for each customer they refer to a company’s website.

Types of Affiliate Marketing Techniques

Affiliates use marketing techniques that are specific to the Internet medium, but that are based on traditional marketing strategies. Direct email marketing is one such technique where names of customers and clients for a similar product to the one they are marketing are obtained, and these prospective clients are sent an email. Originally this was a somewhat unorthodox method, and viewed to be invasive, but it is based on the direct mail – marketing tool, which is very successful in the traditional business arena. Direct email marketing is more accepted than at its inception, and is a very successful method to help grow awareness for your business.

Display advertising is another Internet marketing tool, largely employed by affiliate marketing teams. It is essentially what its name describes: displays of advertising in various locations on the Internet. Display advertising can take a variety of formats – banner ads to side bars being the most widely popular, and all meant to drive business to a particular website, or even a series of websites.

Display ads usually come up on search engine sites, and will correspond to the key work search that was entered. They will advertise a product similar to the one that was entered on the search engine, either in the form of side banner ads, or a position in the list of search results. Display ads are also sometimes sold to occupy space on a company’s website. Thus, you can place ads on another company’s website, or decide to run ads on your own website as a way to generate revenue.

Affiliate marketing is a hugely successful third party marketing strategy, and can be beneficial to almost any business. It shifts the burden of marketing your company’s products and services to another source and alleviates this stress from the business owner. This third party marketer will be dedicated and reliable in the success of marketing your business, because of the individual profit they stand to make as an affiliate.