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3  Online partnerships

Partnerships are an important part of today’s marketing mix. Smith and Chaffey (2005) say 

that they are the eighth ‘P’ (Chapter 8). The same is true online. There are three key types of 

online partnerships: link building (covered in the previous section, this can also be consid-

ered to be part of online PR), affiliate marketing and online sponsorship. All should involve 

a structured approach to managing links through to a site. The important types of partner 

arrangement are as follows.

 (a)  Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing

 has become very popular with e-retailers since many achieve over 20% 

of their online sales through affiliates (also known as ‘aggregators’ since they aggregate offers 

from different providers). The great thing about affiliate marketing for the e-retailer is that 

they, the advertiser, do not pay until the product has been purchased or a lead generated. It is 

sometimes referred to as ‘ zero-  risk advertising’ (Figure 9.14).