What is Affiliate?
An affiliate is someone who earns money by promoting another company's product or service. They could be a blogger, a social media influencer, or even a larger company. They use their own platform to talk about a product and share a special link. If someone clicks that link and makes a purchase, the affiliate gets a commission.
The company gets more sales from a trusted source, and the affiliate gets to monetise their influence. The key to a good affiliate relationship is trust; affiliates should genuinely like the products they promote to keep their audience's confidence.
Affiliates operate in much the same way as referral partners, with a key difference: their main goal is to connect a business with new customers online. This model is extremely popular in the B2C world, but it plays a significant role in B2B contexts, too.
For instance, a company selling a project management software might collaborate with various affiliates. These could be influential bloggers who write about productivity, business consultants who guide their clients to the right tools, or even other tech companies that recommend the software as a useful add-on in their newsletters, all using a special affiliate link to track referrals.