Online Marketing Glossary: Multilevel Marketing

Multilevel Marketing (also Two-Tier Marketing):

• Affiliate program structure whereby affiliates earn commissions on their conversions as well as conversions of webmasters they refer to the program.

This is a pretty sweet deal, and encourages influential bloggers and other publishers that are happy with your program to become evangelists and in turn encourage the people who pay attention to them to pay attention to your program.  There are not many affiliates out there that can successfully parlay this deal into a profitable one, so it’s a relatively easy feature a merchant can add to their program to increase their attractiveness to the publishers.

Although I have to admit that I’ve been using the term two-tier wrong for a couple of years!  Did anyone else think two-tier was when you offered different commission rates to publishers driving sales in different brackets (i.e. 8% for sales <$10k/mo, then 10% for sales >$10k/mo)?  I know someone had to have taught me that, so shame on them! 😉

But now we all know, and knowing is half the battle!

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine