Online advertising is an internet-based marketing strategy where you can promote your brand, product or service.

The main types of online advertising are:

1. Paid search advertising: You can use this type of advertising when you are ready to pay for an ad placed on the search engine results page, thereby increasing the user’s engagement.

2. Display advertising: You can pay for ads that get placed on the websites. Mostly your ads will be shown to the users who are matching your interests.

3. Social media advertising: Your ads will be shown to the users on the social networking platforms.

4. Video advertising: This is one of the most effective ways of advertising your brand, product or service. You can create a video talking about something related to your brand, product or service. Mostly review videos have potential to fetch good results.

5. Email advertising: Even this advertising model is quite impressive. All you have to do is build connections via signup forms, social media followers, YouTube subscribers etc. Once they trust your brand, then you can send periodic newsletters about brand updates, products and services.

These are the main online advertising methods.

Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing where one can receive a commission for referring customers to a product or service.

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that once you send a referral, your job is done.

Everything will be managed by a merchant. To send prospects to the merchant’s website or a landing page, you need to place your unique affiliate link or banner.

When someone clicks on the link and takes action on the merchant page within the cookie period, you will receive commission. The cookie period and commission rates are fixed by merchant.

Many often confuse referral marketing with affiliate marketing. In affiliate marketing, you don’t need to be a customer of any program.

You join the merchant affiliate program and straightway promote to earn commissions. Whereas in referral marketing, you should be an existing user or a customer.

Generally, the referral program rewards the users in the form of cashbacks, credits, discounts, loyalty points and free subscriptions.

Recurring commission means you will receive commission every single month or week, until your referred customer stays with the merchant affiliate program.

Not all affiliate programs offer recurring commissions. You can search them or find the recurring affiliate programs in some affiliate networks like Shareasale.

Affiliate program is offered by a merchant to promote their product or service. The merchant will compensate affiliates for recommending customers.