Affiliate Marketing in a Nutshell

Written By: Robert Kleine
Published: March 23, 2009 8:31:21 AM

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing was used on the internet by the adult industry before CDNow launched their BuyWeb program. Affiliate marketing and working with niche markets are two of the fastest growing and most lucrative internet businesses in the world and the way to go today if you are young or old and eager to make a lot of money. Affiliate Marketing is also one the quickest and easiest ways for you to start a home-based Internet business without producing your own products, worrying about staying up late to take care of customer service, inventory, overhead, and more. Those are for the vendor to worry about, not you the affiliate.

Affiliates

Affiliates place the ads of advertisers on their websites and make money by referring people to those products and services. Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner. Affiliates were among the earliest adopters of pay-per-click advertising when the first PPC search engines like Goto.com came onto the Internet scene.

Although the majority of affiliates are honest people just trying to make themselves some extra money, unscrupulous affiliates have used spam, false advertisements, forced clicks (to get tracking cookies set on users' computers), adware, and other shady methods to drive traffic to their sponsors. Most vendors make potential affiliates agree to never use these practices before they will allow them to sign on to their affiliate program.

Affiliate Programs

Eighty percent of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) as compensation methods, nineteen percent use cost per action (CPA) and the remaining one percent use other methods, such as cost per click (CPC). Some merchants run their own affiliate programs (In House) while others use third party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred by affiliates. Once you know how to make money online with affiliate programs and where to find them, you need to know what the most profitable affiliate programs are. Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Networks are almost always free to participate in for affiliates.

Some affiliate programs have no approval process, while some very definitely do require a review of your websites and personal information. You can for instance; sign up for a great network like Shareasale or Commission Junction and through them join literally hundreds of affiliate programs they manage under one umbrella. The approval process for these top rated affiliate networks is relatively quick and easy. Once a member, you also need to be approved by the individual affiliate programs inside the network before promoting their products.

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

Affiliate marketing is considered by many to be one of the best ways to earn money online. It can be a really fun and exciting home business that you can run from your personal computer, or notebook. Affiliate marketing is not for everyone, of course, but for those who see their future working from home, it's one of the best and most profitable choices. Affiliate marketing can be a full time career, or for many affiliates, simply a way to make a great part time income.

Whichever way you see yourself participating in the affiliate marketing industry, whether as a full time income or just a way to make some extra cash, do your homework before you get started. There are many affiliate marketing guides designed and created for newbie affiliate marketers. Do a search on Google or whatever your favorite search engine might be for the term "affiliate marketing guides" or "affiliate marketing tutorials" and you'll find a plethora of downloadable information to get you started in your affiliate marketing career.