Affil­i­ate Mar­ket­ing is an entire chap­ter of Online Marketing.

Affil­li­ate mar­ket­ing sys­tems con­sist of ads links or ban­ner which are tracked by com­pa­nies or agen­cies. The income is based on PPS (pay per sell) and PPC (pay per click). There are other pos­si­bil­i­ties but PPC and PPS are the most profitable.

Basi­cally there are affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing agen­cies which pro­vide affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing sys­tems every­one can join, such as Zanox and Trade Dou­bler. Alter­nately some com­pa­nies pro­pose affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing sys­tems any­one can join, Ama­zon or Ebay for example.

In addi­tion to that there are inter­nal affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing sys­tems such as the one Face­book uses. Basi­cally each Face­book mem­ber can adver­tise what­ever he wants inside the com­mu­nity by click­ing on the link “Adver­tise” and then by quickly and eas­ily select­ing some data to cross in order to define the affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing cam­paign: typol­ogy of peo­ple, loca­tion, key­words etc. 

I used it to adver­tise the launch of my pro­fes­sional per­sonal web­site and found it very expensive.

Nev­er­the­less I’ll give it a go again to adver­tise my brand new social net­work next year.

Any ques­tion?