Business, Marketing

What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Can Webmasters Earn Revenue From It?

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The internet has helped open up a whole new range of business opportunities for entrepreneurs and ordinary people, as well as levelling the playing field for many existing businesses.

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From e-commerce to online content and services, there are many ways to earn money online, one of which is affiliate marketing. As with any other technology, new opportunities are continuously being opened up due to the innovative and democratic nature of the internet such that people can make a profit from them.

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With that in mind, this post takes a closer look at what affiliate marketing is, how it works and how webmasters earn revenue through it.

What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?

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Most experienced bloggers and online marketers will already be familiar with affiliate marketing, but the concept is not entirely new nor is it unique to the internet. Affiliate marketing in its simplest form is whereby a person refers someone to any product or service and when they buy something based on the recommendation, the person then receives commission.

Online affiliate marketing works in much the same way, except everything is processed digitally and the large number of internet users means that it has now grown into an extremely lucrative and popular method.

In most cases, online affiliate marketers earn money when members of their audience click on a link to purchase a product or service from an e-commerce retailer. The retailer then pays a percentage of the products’ value to the marketer who referred the customer.

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Popular methods of online affiliate marketing include product reviews, gambling affiliate sites such as, or sharing links of popular products. The process is popular due to low entrance costs to webmasters who simply build a site and a target audience in a niche of their choosing, who they then refer to retailers’ websites.

How webmasters earn revenue from affiliate marketing

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Webmasters earn money through online affiliate marketing by receiving a percentage of the cost price of a product as paid for by a referred customer. Due to the increasingly competitive nature of the internet the majority of major online retailers use this method to get customers including Amazon, travel sites, and online gambling operators.

Customers are tracked from the referrers site to the retailers platform using cookies, a technology that is used to store data such as when a user logged on to a website, which links they clicked and so forth.

The advantages of affiliate marketing are that instead of trying to attract a varying range of customer’s, retailers can simply pay a commission to niche platforms that refer them to the different sections of their store. For example, a gardening blogger can review a product in Amazon’s garden section while a fashion expert can send customers to its clothes section. In the same way, an online bingo games reviewer can do the same for a gambling operator, thereby creating a win-win situation for the retailers who get a customer, and the blogger, who gets paid a commission for their work.

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In an increasingly competitive environment, commissions can vary, but even small amounts can add up to a lot of money given the potential number of visitors’ marketers can refer. Online affiliate marketing has therefore adopted an existing offline method and created a lucrative source of profit for anyone willing to put in the work and build an audience around a niche subject of their choice.

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