Web marketing is the latest trend of online marketing methods. It contains various segments and affiliate marketing is one of them. The process of affiliate marketing commonly involves four parties: the affiliates' website, the affiliate network, the advertiser and the buyer. Let us understand them one-by-one.

The affiliates' website

The affiliate owns a website. Every business needs a website for its digital presence in these days. The website owner is called as an affiliate if he/she wants to go for affiliate marketing. That affiliate could be anyone. The website an affiliate owns may contain the information of a product/service or reviews, in the form of videos about a product sold on the advertiser's website. It also provides links to the advertiser's product/service page via a special link, known as an affiliate link.

The advertiser

The advertiser could be any business which sells a product or service online and they are looking for affiliates to market that advertiser's product/service. It could be e-commerce site, a video production company's site or anything else. The advertiser has to pay some amount to the affiliate for this service, based on various factors like time span, ad location, keywords etc.

The affiliate networks

Then comes is the role of affiliate network that drops a tracking cookie inside the buyer's browser when they visit an advertisers website as a result of clicking an affiliate link on the affiliate's website. Basically, they are used for purchasing it from the same advertiser in the future, unless and until the cookie is not removed.

The buyer is an ultimate player of this game. He completes the marketing cycle by purchasing the same product from advertiser's website.