Butterfly marketing and affiliate marketing as tools to increase sales

One of the most tried, trusted, and beneficial ways of increasing web sales through advertising is affiliate marketing. This is basically a profit share sort of idea, where an affiliate is given a form of commission from a merchant, based on how many sales she has generated through advertising on their site.

Whereas butterfly marketing is pretty new, affiliate marketing started just four years after the internet was launched, and lots of successful e-commerce sites owe much to this simple yet effective method.

We find three types of affiliate marketing methods. They are pay per click, pay per action and pay per sale. In pay per click sales are generated through clicks from the affiliate his site to the merchant his site. Pay per action and pay per sale are very similar. The affiliate receives a commission based on every sale that is generated through his traffic. The last two methods are much more populair because of the safety they bring for the merchant. Fraudsters take a lot of advantage through the pay per click way by setting up sites with forced cklicks, adware, pop-ups, false advertising, spam and lots of 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 very effective way of advertising, presenting little to no risk for both the seller and the reseller.