Affiliate marketing program – is a type of business interplay between the seller and partners, in which the partners attract web traffic to the merchant site and receive bonuses as a percentage or a fixed amount for any specified action.

According to the legend, the idea of paying commissions to partner sites for various activities with the users they brought, firstly came to Jeff Bezos. He is an owner of the largest online store, Amazon, which has a massive amount of website traffic. It happened in a conversation at a cocktail party in the mid ninety’s.

We can not say this idea was a novel because a network of distributors, who distribute goods of a large seller, is a standard technique in offline business. However , it was obligatory to actualize a partnership scheme in the Net and create a massive network of partner sites, which would bring consumers to www.amazon.com.

I must say that the task was performed with brilliance and the quantity of partners of Amazon has surpassed five hundred thousand folks already by 2k. One can only imagine how much sales increased. The Bezos invention was the start line for the development of new industry in the internet, known as affiliating marketing.

Today, the industry includes a directory of affiliate programs, forums for partners and owners of companions, specialized mailing and affiliate networks ; there are professions like the chief of the affiliate program and super affiliate that is to assert pro partner. The affiliating marketing draws a growing number of participators annually : many thousands of sites create new affiliate programs, millions of sites – from homepages to such monsters as look smart and Yahoo – have become partners.

According to Forester Research firm, twenty p.c. of the total turnover of e-commerce is made by partners. Even more imagination dazzled are the following statistics calculations : eMarketer and Forester Research proved that in 2004 the turnover of the web advertising market reached $ 22 bn., 54% of which, that’s to say, more than $ 11 billion were spent on affiliating marketing. Now we can not imagine a solid e-commerce site, which doesn’t have an affiliate program.

Further development of partnership programs in the West is probably going to go on the way of relationships between sellers and partners improving. Increasingly there are partnership offers where the partners are given the opportunity not only to put on their sites selected links, banners, order forms, but also create unique sites with ready made design templates, and export the necessary info.

There had been a clear trend to integration between the parties of associating business schemes increasing. New forms of relations that’ll be more flexible and efficient will appear there. There’s another interesting aspect of the problem. For many internet stores sales volume, free web traffic produced by partner sites, has become an essential part of the budget. The situation is increasingly approaching the critical point where the tail starts to wag the dog”.

Don’t be stunned if there will be informal affiliations with names like “Union of pro Amazon affiliates in the near future, that may make requests to their bosses to improve conditions of the affiliate program.