Affiliate marketing involves advertising done by affiliate marketers for the products of a merchant who in turn pays the affiliates for any sales brought by him. This is done by driving traffic to the merchant site by the affiliates through various means and tools. When traffic is driven towards the merchant site, by the efforts of an affiliate, he (the affiliate marketer) is paid by the merchant if any sales have been generated by his efforts.

Tools Of Affiliate Marketing

There are various tools through which the affiliates achieve the mission of driving traffic to the merchant sites. We will discuss some of those tools today.

One of the major and result oriented tools used by affiliate marketers is Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine optimization is a process of improving the rank of any website in the search engines by way of back linking and many other off page methods. When a person searches for something and enters a query into the search engine and finds the merchant’s website on the first few rankings, he is bound to pay the site a visit. In this way, the motive of driving traffic to the merchant site is achieved by the affiliate marketers.

Another method that the affiliate internet marketing companies use is email marketing. By way of bulk email marketing, a large audience is reached and informed about the merchant site which gives the site click throughs and sales.

Search Engine Marketing is also one such tool wherein traffic is driven to specific websites by paying for their URL to appear in the first few pages of search engines as advertisements. This is a guaranteed way of Return On Investment.

One more tool worthy of discussion is the banner and display advertising. This involves placing ads on various mediums for the merchant site to gain exposure and get traffic.

Affiliate marketing is a preferable marketing tool for merchants because they have to pay only when they generate sales through this medium. It is popularly known as “pay for performance” model of marketing and the merchant has no additional expenses except when they start to get new customers and generate sales.