Let's have a look at the key players in affiliate marketing. There are mainly 4 important players in any type of affiliate marketing. These are the merchant. the product creator or what we call as company, the network that supports marketing, the affiliate who does marketing of the products and the customer who buys the products of the company. While all four key players must exist, each of them is equally important in successful affiliate marketing.
The merchant or the product creator is also known as the advertiser and he is normally the company who is offerings its products or services for sale. There are many companies today that rightly feel that if they want to grow successfully online then they should market their products well.
Many companies today outsource their marketing to affiliates who are ready to do marketing based on a certain percentage of commission through traffic and sales affected by them. Hence this is a win win situation for the advertiser and the affiliate, the advertiser gets targeted traffic to his offer while the affiliate gets his commission if that traffic converts to sales .
The advertisers/publishers/affiliates network consists of the medium through which the marketing efforts are carried out. Today the most preferred network used is the internet as it is quick and it is fast. It does not have any global boundaries and an advertisement put up on the internet from anywhere in the world can be seen by people, no matter in which country they are residing. Hence if you want to be a successful affiliate marketer then you should definitely learn the ways of doing it on the internet. The affiliate network is also called as a middleman between the advertiser and affiliate marketer.
Next in line is the affiliate. He is a person who control the traffic and markets the advertisers products and services and gets commission in return. He uses media such as the internet to market the products of the company in different ways such as link building and email marketing in a case that he own a subscriber list, article and video marketing, social marketing, blogs, seo, content syndication or pre selling techniques. When a customer clicks on the affiliate link, he is led to the website of the advertiser. Hence more and more customers will come to know about the advertiser and the products that it offers. The affiliate is then paid as a percentage of the sales that are made through his reference.
Smart affiliates direct traffic from their own blog or website to the advertiser’s website so instead of sending the traffic directly to the advertiser squeeze or sales page, they might even use their own squeeze page for pre selling purposes or for lead capture before directing so they won't lose the traffic they've worked hard to get.
As a smart affiliate you will have to create a good looking website that will convert your affiliate offers. I get emails from affiliates that can't understand why they aren't doing any money after using various traffic techniques that brings in traffic. When I check their funnel, I see ugly squeeze or landing pages, blogs or websites, so I can clearly see why their offers can't convert to sales.
You just can not do everything right except the last step, this is where all happen, this is where you should put efforts in, this is where you should use your copy-writing skills and if you don't have any, just think as a buyer and use the words that would convince you to buy the products, don't just kill the page with words, ugly font, unrelated images or ugly headers etc. This is where the traffic lands and it should feel like it landed where it should be. I've used the word traffic for dramatization purposes but in fact it is buyers.
Choose what type of products you would like to advertise. We've been talking a lot on how to choose a product. I would just say that you must find a hungry niche, a product that will solve an immediate problem (key), and that that niche has a significant amount of monthly searches. Sign up for the marketing or affiliate program and then decide the ways in which you will promote the products of the company.
There are endless ways in which an affiliate can choose the advertiser but there's only one better way. You will absolutely need to carefully check the product you are going to promote and even buy it if you can not get a look at it. You must ensure that the product should be interesting enough for you to sell, that the product will benefit your subscribers and then you will need to check the advertiser sales funnel.
Check traffic stats, where the traffic you'll send will land, a squeeze page or directly to the sales page. If it will land on the sales page than you can use pre-sell techniques to pre-sell the product on one of your pages to increase conversions. Ask what are the conversion rates of the landings pages, the estimate $ per click (EPC). I even check about the back end products that the advertiser will use and if I get any commission on the back end as well and the payouts.
As an affiliate who wants to build a sustainable online business, you must carefully go through these steps to choose the advertiser you will send precious traffic to his sales funnel, so if your traffic converts to sales, both you, the affiliate and the advertiser are in for a long time collaboration, and it might be useful to know that you both, sees online marketing and business growth the same.
About the ways to choose the medium of advertisement all you need to do is to click some links on my blog to find a lot about social marketing such as Twitter or Facebook. Article marketing and how to seo your article so it will land on the search engines first pages, so just take a look around and you'll find some precious traffic generation techniques.
My favourites biggest networks that supports marketing are Click Bank, Commission Junction, LinkShare and the promising DigiResults where I would suggest you to join.
Hence we see that all the four players in affiliate marketing are interrelated and it is the perfect combination of all the factors that will make your affiliate marketing campaign successful.
As you probably already know I love to write about ways to get web traffic. It's a challenge and I just love to create new sites for my clients and to find new ways to achieve high ranking and to drive 
