Affiliate marketing is the online version of networking – you network with other businesses to generate business. It gives your brand access to a wider network of people due to placing your advertisement on affiliate websites.

*New Media Co tip: We strongly believe that you need to know your affiliates in order to receive better quality leads.

Affiliate marketing is known to be a beneficial and measurable method of advertising which delivers long-term results. It’s primarily associated with where a brand advertises their product/service on an affiliate website. Most brands will reward an affiliate on a results basis instead of paying them a set amount.

Most people associate affiliate marketing with when an advertising brand sets up an affiliate offer in order to advertise out to a wider audience. From this, websites within a similar industry sign up so as to make some money on the side by placing one of the advertiser’s display banners on their website. Yet there is another approach to affiliate marketing…

There are affiliate networks, which are considered to be the ‘middle man’. They can be used to make your advertising process easier and more successful. These affiliate networks both help you decide on the most suitable creatives to advertise with (from the brand/advertiser) and then reach out to their network of affiliates/publishers to put out these creatives in the most appropriate web spaces in order to drive the highest quality traffic.

Affiliate networking unlocks access to a wider audience that they currently cannot reach. As I mentioned before, it’s the online way of handing out your business card.

The reason affiliate marketing as a whole is successful is because it’s a measurable process. You can track each advertisement through specific platforms (including the NMC Network – too hard not to boast about our proprietary platform in this context!). This allows both the publisher and the advertiser to see how well a creative is doing and therefore, act upon its results, leading to better results all around.

Some people aren’t certain of affiliate marketing as there is that improbability to where it will lead. However, if you use a trusted (affiliate) network then there is control over each advertisement (what gets put where and when) and therefore the quality of leads generated.