One needs to get to the basic terminological understanding of affiliate marketing business to be a pro at this strategy. It is in fact helpful to understand these words for you to easily work your way through the affiliate marketing business. This article, I’m sure, will prove to be very helpful to those who are looking for a career as an affiliate and are new to the industry.

Affiliate marketing business terminologies

So, who is an affiliate, first? Someone who promotes a product or service on his website or blog is known to be an affiliate, one of the most targeted careers emerging off late and quite profitable also. The products or services that affiliates promote on their websites are not necessarily their own. They often belong to another party called the advertiser or merchant.

The advertiser or the merchant, secondly, is the actual owner of the products and services that the affiliates promote. These are the same people who fix the amount of commissions and make the payments to the affiliate if there is some kind of action performed on the links that they have provided as ad promotions on the affiliate website.

That brings us next to the affiliate links. To facilitate the merchants to make payments to the affiliate precisely for the efforts he has made in promoting the merchant’s products, the affiliates are provided with a unique affiliate code that helps the merchant know which lead is made by the particular affiliate, in order for the affiliate to get his commission on it.

To understand that, we need to get to know what a lead is. A lead is the contact information or connection with a potential customer who buys or is willing to buy the merchant product. Thus when the affiliate sends a visitor from his site to the merchant site through his efforts, the merchant encourages this visitor to either sign up for a newsletter, or to fill up a contact form, if the visitor is not currently ready to buy from him. This means that this visitor is a lead and a potential buyer.

Now, affiliates are generally paid through different ways which include the likes of pay-per-lead, pay-per-click, pay-per-sale, etc. It can be easily understood what each means. They mean that the merchant will pay the affiliate in either of the three different scenarios, that is when lead is directed to the merchant site, or when an ad is clicked on, or if a sale is made.

Further there are affiliate managers, in the affiliate marketing business,  who intend to help the affiliates get along their efforts of promoting the business of the merchant. They make the transactions between the affiliates and the merchant easier, help them earn the right commissions by negotiating with the merchants and keep track of the performance of the affiliates in order to help the merchants.

To sum it up, in the affiliate marketing business, Affiliates are friends which help the merchants in promoting their products by recommending them to their other friends who follow believe and trust them, that is, their blog or site visitors.