Advertisers pay for results rather than paying to reach a particular audience or gathering a certain amount of traffic. Publishers advertise products or services offered by advertisers in exchange for commissions on actions. Publishers display ads, banners, text links or products on their website and via email campaigns.

The actions are mostly recorded by way of cookies which are set on visitor’s browser identifying advertiser, publisher and specific action incurred.

Affiliate Marketing is a very friendly and open way of advertising. Publishers choose who they would like to advertise, thus are able to include relevant content whilst making commission for advertising them. Paying only for performance removes much of risk from merchants and places it upon affiliates. The only risk that merchants need be aware of may be in a worst case scenario risk of fraud from partner sites.

Both Amazon and eBay are of first significant adopters of affiliate marketing technique and now have substantial affiliate relationships measuring in hundreds and thousands.

Adopting Comprehensive Media Strategies

All four media that have been discussed within this article, namely natural and paid search, viral and affiliate marketing may be used independently from each other, and may deliver very effective results for your website.

If your product or service lies within a very competitive niche of market however, a comprehensive implementation comprising all four should be considered to achieve maximum return on investment.

Here link to Google Sitemaps' FAQ: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html

As webmasters and web owners, you might want to take advantage of Google Sitemaps to get more of your web pages crawled and also get your pages crawled faster.