The digital solutions have changed much of the business outlook. The technologies have made it easier to reach the audience. Also, the time and efforts saved by implementing digital solutions have given the business world a whole new dimension.

Digital marketing is the contemporary answer to the needs of the business. It involves a number of marketing methods like web marketing, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, SMS marketing, etc. Most among these are based on the marketing on the web.

Affiliate marketing is that marketing in which the web site owners come to the forefront. The owners of web sites and portals display different content about the advertiser and help him promote his business.

As soon as selling and promoting was practiced on the web sites, the dealers started to extend their services to different web site publishers. Soon the publishers joined and started displaying the contextual ads and links of the service providers. At that time two things were required. - the web site or portal of the publisher and the web site or portal of the advertiser. In this way the publisher’s site promoted the advertiser’s or merchant’s site. Today, affiliate marketing has evolved and a whole range of tasks have been uncovered.

Affiliate marketing helps the advertiser or merchants to sell their products or services. Suppose there is an online music portal selling tracks for few dollars. The affiliates display the advertisements and the links of the provider. The traffic on the site of affiliate sees the links and may click to find them and purchase them.

If you observe the situation above more closely you will find that affiliate can be helpful in a number of ways. Affiliates can direct the traffic from their sites to merchants’, they can generate enquiries or business leads or they can just increase the visibility of any brand on the web. It is for these tasks that affiliates are based.

The payments models in affiliate marketing are fixed for any of the tasks. The merchant might be paying for the clicks on the ads or links, for the enquiries or business leads or for displaying the advertisements of the merchants. The rules are fixed and agreed by both affiliates and the merchants.