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Affiliate program - is a form of business cooperation between the vendor and partners, in which the partners attract web traffic to the merchant site and receive bonuses as a percentage or a fixed amount for any cited action.

According to the legend, the concept of paying commissions to partner sites for varied activities with the users they brought, firstly came to Jeff Bezos. He’s an owner of the largest online store, Amazon, which has a massive amount of website traffic. It happened during a conversation at a dinner party in the mid ninety’s.

We can not say this idea was a novel because a network of distributors, who distribute goods of a gigantic seller, is the standard methodology in offline business. However , it was obligatory to commission a partnership scheme in the internet and create a huge network of partner sites, which would bring purchasers to www.amazon.com.

I must say that the task was performed with brilliance and the amount of partners of Amazon has exceeded five hundred thousand people already by two thousand. One can only imagine how much sales increased. The Bezos invention was the starting point for the development of new industry in the Net, known as affiliating marketing.

Today, the industry contains a catalog of affiliate programs, forums for partners and owners of companions, specialised mailing and affiliate networks ; there are professions like the chief of the affiliate program and super affiliate that is to assert professional partner. The associating marketing draws a growing number of participants annually : many thousands of sites create new affiliate programs, millions of sites - from homepages to such monsters as seem smart and Yahoo - have become partners.

According to Forester Research firm, twenty percent of the total turnover of e-commerce is created by partners. Even more imagination amazed are the following probabilistic calculations : eMarketer and Forester Research showed clearly that in 2004 the turnover of the online advertising market reached $ 22 bill, 54% of which, that’s to say, more than $ 11 bill were spent on affiliating selling. Now we will be able to not imagine a solid e-commerce site, which doesn’t have an affiliate program.

Further development of partnership programs in the West is likely to go on the way of relationships between vendors and partners improving. Increasingly there are partnership offers where the partners are given the opportunity not only to put on their sites selected links, banners, order forms, but also create unique sites with ready made design templates, and export the required data.

There had been a clear trend to integration between the parties of associating business schemes enlarging. New sorts of relationships that will be more flexible and efficient will appear there. There is another fascinating facet of the problem. For many web stores sales volume, free web traffic produced by partner sites, has become a vital component of the budget. The situation is increasingly approaching the vital point where the tail starts to wag the dog”.

Do not be shocked if there will be informal affiliations with names like “Union of pro Amazon affiliates in the near future, that may make demands to their bosses to improve conditions of the affiliate program.