Google in Affiliate Marketing?

It seems that all roads lead to Google, and sooner or later, if you’re doing anything online, you’ll be doing it with Google. But this time, I’m not going to let Google make me pee my pants. I actually think this could be a good thing for affiliate marketing as a whole.

I think most people don’t get what affiliate marketing is, and that’s a shame because it’s a really great way to market and advertise a product or service.
Google calls it Pay-Per-Action, but it’s affiliate marketing. Here’s how they define it:

Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher’s site. You’ll define an action, set up conversion tracking, and create ads that publishers in the Google content network can then choose to place in new ad units on their site.

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you only pay when an action occurs. So instead of buying a TV spot or a billboard enticing people to buy your t-shirts, you pay only when someone brings you a customer that actually buys a t-shirt. Your fans become your salesforce. Your customers become your salesforce. It’s a beautiful thing, and it’s what siteMighty is making accessible to everyone.