Butterfly marketing and affiliate marketing as tools to increase sales

Affiliate marketing is one of the most trusted, tested and profitable ways of increasing online sales. Affiliate marketing is basically a revenue share sort of system. The affiliate is honoured with some sort of a commission based on the amount of sales that he is able to generate. Advertising on websites is the most commom used tool for doing so.

Affiliate marketing started just four years after the launch of the internet and is relatively old. Butterfly marketing is relatively new compared to affiliate marketing. A lot of successful e-commerce sites owe their success to these types of marketing.

There are 3 types of affiliate marketing strategies of payment: it's pay-per-click (generated by actual referrals to the seller from the reseller's site), pay-per-action or pay-per-sale (very similar, in that the affiliate receives payment, either a fixed amount or commission, based on the sales or subscriptions that have come through referrals or adverts on the reseller's site.) The last two strategies of payment are generally preferred by merchants, because of many fraudsters taking advantage of the click system by setting up sites with forced clicks, pop-ups, adware, spam, false advertising and many other "black hat" strategies.

Affiliate marketing is not limited to only display-adverts on an affiliate website, but also comes in the form of email, blogs, rss feeds, content and niche sites, loyalty sites, comparison sites or shopping directories, and other forms. It is a very low cost, but highly effective way of advertising, presenting little to no risk for both the seller and the affiliate.