ways of marketing a product

            Marketing a product is one of the most important part of a business cycle. There are many ways of promoting a product or marketing a product. Traditional marketing methods include giving   

advertisement in print media like newspapers and magazines. Whenever people used to see an advertisement of a particular product on a newspaper or on a magazine, the sales of that product used to shoot up like anything. Then times changed and competition increased. Now those products used to have their say who gave advertisements on television. Television was stuffed with a lot of advertisements and any product that wanted to leave its mark, had to have its advertisement on television. However, in the modern times ecommerce has become the talk of the town and now internet marketing has become popular among all the brands. There are many types of internet marketing and one of them is affiliate marketing.

            Of all the forms of internet marketing, affiliate marketing is not the most popular one. However, it is fast spreading its wings. Now, it is important that before we go deep in the topic, all the basic concepts related to affiliate marketing must be understood. To begin with, the first and the foremost part of the process of affiliate marketing is the merchant. The merchant is the brand of whose product the customer is going to buy. Second comes the affiliate who is also known as the website owner or the website publisher. The affiliate owns the website and displays the merchant’s link on its website. Last but not the least and most important of them all is the customer who clicks on that link and buys the product of the merchant. Now this is a win-win situation for the merchant, the affiliate and the customer. Thus, the basic set up of affiliate marketing is pretty simple. However, the terms of sharing money between the merchant and the affiliate has changed over the course of time and now methods like pay per click are more in usage.

            Now when we know about this method of affiliate marketing, let us see some of the positives and negatives of this process. Well, let us start with the positives first. The merchants get a wider base than anywhere else and thus it helps them in pocketing more money. Merchants in case of affiliate marketing unlike other marketing processes do not run behind the customers to woo them. Even the affiliates get a side income in the form of the commission they get from the merchants every time a product is bought from the merchant. To top on it, the affiliate does not have to do much in order to earn this side income.

            However, like every other thing in the world, affiliate marketing has its share of downfalls as well. Many a times the affiliates create malicious and ambiguous links in order to get the commission. This is a very common method of forgery among the affiliates. Also, there are many cases of unlawful or false logo display cases which makes this method of marketing pretty dangerous.