Affiliate Marketing is the term used to describe a form of online advertising which consists of rewarding an affiliate for referring a visitor or rewarding a customer for performing a desired action, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter. In a way, Affiliate Marketing can be regarded as free publicity for your page—a network of related websites directing customers to purchase from yours.
Affiliate campaigns have the best results when they are combined with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, email marketing support and are well-suited for travel, retail, and service industries due to their timely research process/large-volume sales.
Effective Affiliate Marketing is not throwing a bunch of links at different website owners in the hopes that something will stick. It is a well-planned, specified effort intended to develop long-term relationships with third party websites, research industry-relevant websites with trusted pages and build up a valuable affiliate network for your website that will bring in quality, converted traffic.
Social Media Marketing is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social book-marking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the website popularity by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogsphere and special blog search engines such as Technorati. Social Media Marketing is closely related to other Online Marketing Techniques, such as Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Viral Marketing Word of Mouth Marketing, and Social Media Optimization.
