Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or additional affiliates for every visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing hard work. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four core players: the merchant, the network, the publisher and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with further Internet marketing methods to several degrees, because affiliates often use usual advertising methods. Those methods contain organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use fewer orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services obtainable by a partner.
Affiliate marketing using one website to drive traffic to another is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture a lot of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a good deal lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.