Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a technique online businesses use to market themselves, by harnessing the energy of third party websites to promote offers to their customers in exchange for a share of the financial returns. The model began in 1994 with music pioneer CDNow and was popularized most successfully by Amazon. The approach of sharing the risk and rewards in marketing has been particularly favored by the online retail industry, although the growth of affiliate networks that broker these relationships made the model much more accessible to less digitally savvy marketers.