Four main parties, that you'll need to understand.
1.) Merchant, also known as the retailer, or brand.
Merchant's are the entity or company that provides an affiliate program for publishers.
2.)Publishers, also known as the affiliate.
Publishers are smaller entities that does marketing or advertising for the Merchant's products or services.
3.)The Network, contains offers for the publishers to choose and also takes care of the payments.
4.)The Customer. Consumer that bought the offers.
The Affiliate Marketing Strategy was popularized by Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon.com in 1996.
Amazon.com attracts affiliates to post links to individual books for sale on Amazon.com, or for Amazon.com in general, by promising them a percentage of the profits if someone clicks on the link and then purchases books or other items. The affiliate helps make the sale, but Amazon.com does everything else: They take the order, collect the money and ship the book to the customer.
There are three basic types of affiliate program:
Pay-per-sale (cost-per-sale): the merchant site pays an affiliate when the affiliate sends them a customer who purchases something. Some merchant Web sites, like Amazon.com, pay the affiliate a percentage of the sale and others pay a fixed amount per sale.
Pay-per-click (cost-per-click): the merchant site pays the affiliate based on the number of visitors who click on the link to come to the merchant's site. They don't have to buy anything, and it doesn't matter to the affiliate what a visitor does once he gets to the merchant's site.
Pay-per-lead (cost-per-lead): the merchant pay their affiliates based on the number of visitors they refer who sign up as leads. This simply means the customer fills out some requested information at the merchant site, which the merchant site may use as a sales lead or sell to another company as a sales lead.
