What is Affiliate Marketing?
An affiliate-marketing program is an agreement between a company that has products or services for sale and anyone who believes they can help to sell those products and services for the company. In short, if you have products and services, consider using an affiliate system to get the word out about your products. Alternatively, if you have a popular website, consider putting someone else's products or services on your site and earning commissions on your sales.

Who Should Sell Through Affiliates?
If you offer any products or services on your website in such a way that customers actually make the payment on the website, then you are a good candidate for selling through an affiliate program. If you tend to "close the deal" over the phone, then the affiliate management company will be unable to know when sales occurred and will not be able to administer the program for you.

Your product should have appeal to people throughout the nation or even the world. Local products are harder to sell through affiliates although it is possible.

Why Sell Through Affiliates?
Imagine having ads for your products placed on hundreds of websites throughout the nation or even the world. Companies such as NetFlix.com are very successful with their affiliate programs.

Who Should Sell Products Using Affiliate Marketing?
If you have a website that is rich in traffic but poor in generating cash in your pocket, then you are the perfect candidate for adding affiliate marketing to your website. Affiliate programs are ideal for anyone that already has content and visitors. If your site is not very popular then an affiliate system may not be worth the trouble. For this article, we will assume you are the ideal candidate for affiliate marketing.

The KEY to success is to ad products to your site that are highly appealing to the people that visit your website. If your website does movie reviews, you want to partner with NetFlix.com and other video or entertainment programs. If your website focuses on gardening, then add gardening and home improvement products to your website.

How to Get Started
Whether you buy or whether you sell, it all starts by joining an affiliate marketing management company. These companies do all the hard work of tracking sales, paying commissions, and matching product companies with webmasters who want to add affiliate products to their site.

cj.com - Commission Junction
ClickBank.com - Click Bank
LinkShare.com - Link Share

Secrets to Success
It is important to consider the many factors affecting the success of an affiliate marketing system. There are so many factors that we cannot go into them here. We will consult with you about your particular needs. What is important is to do lots of testing. Try different ads, different products, different placements on the page, and keep switching things around while you carefully track what is working and what is not. With a little practice you will likely end up with a lucrative system.

Affiliate Marketing is one of the hottest subjects of the web these days... but how does Affiliate Marketing work?

Sure, you've heard a lot about Affiliate Marketing and you may even know someone who makes money as an Affiliate Marketer, but you're STILL confused about how this stuff works!

OK, OK... relax. I'm going to explain this stuff as easily as I can. Are you with me? OK, let's go...

Affiliate Marketing is simply the art of selling products for a company. It's like being a Car Salesman who works on commission, except as a car salesman - you can't sell just any car (in most cases). You're stuck selling a specific brand (unless you're selling used cars).

As an Affiliate Marketer, you're given a special "link" (URL) that holds your "user identification" so that the company who supplies you the link can keep track of the sales you have referred to their site...

So, for instance, your Affiliate Link might look similar to: http://merchantsite.net/affiliates/a.php?aid=8732&p=239

Now I could explain what this link means - but that might be going too far off subject and it may only confuse you in the end. But notice the "aid=8732" ? That stands for "AffiliateID" (Affiliate Identification) and when a user clicks on this link - that number is given what's called a "click" to the database. The database (simply a text file that holds a ton of information that we don't really care about right now...) saves that click information and adds up each one. It also (in most cases) saves the Website URL that the click came from... make sense?

Let's say that "Julie" clicks your link when she's on "somesite.com", right? When it's clicked - the link tells the Website Database to save the click for statistical purposes, along with the referring page (somesite.com) so you can see exactly where the link was placed at. This information (your stats) help you identify your best "campaigns" (we'll get to that in a moment).

I should explain part of the process in a little more details. You might have heard of a "cookie"... it's not something you eat - a Cookie (online) is a little file that saves little bits of information about you, the affiliate, as well as the user who clicked the link. For one - it saves your Affiliate ID # (8732, for this tutorial) onto Julie's computer, for later use. Most cookies last anywhere from 30 minutes, up to 30 years! The average is probably closer to 60 days, though. Most merchants tell you when their cookies expire.

Now, what is Julie decided to purchase a product from "merchantsite.net", the cookie that's saved on her machine is accessed by the Website and it knows that YOU were the referring Affiliate. This means that the database knows that Affiliate ID# 8732 has just made a sale, and it saves this information to the Affiliate Database so that you and the Merchant know exactly what's going on.

So, the flow is something like this:

Julie clicks the link -> the Website now inserts a cookie onto her Computer (your Affiliate ID is not saved for later use) -> Julie decides that she likes a certain product and makes a purchase -> The Database saves the sale transaction and points your ID to the purchase receipt -> you have now made a sale.

Does this make sense? I hope so!

Let's continue!

There are many Affiliate Programs that you can join. Commission Junction is a service that gives some of the worlds Highest Quality brands the ability to market their Affiliate services to Affiliate Marketers, world wide. LinkShare and ShareASale are the same. There's also services such as ClickBank, as well.

When you sign up with a service such as Commission Junction, you can apply to one of these brand name Merchants to become an Affiliate. Companies such as Yahoo! have great products to promote and give their Affiliates some very enticing commissions.

Let's go over some of the basics of Affiliate "numbers", to help you better understand what they mean.

IMPRESSIONS = The number of times the link appeared on a page

CLICKS = The number of times your link was actually clicked

CTR = Click Thru Rate ... the number of times your link was clicked, divided by the number of Impressions.

COMMISSION EARNINGS = This is the total amount of money you have made

SALES = The number of sales you have made

Now, you will also see that some Merchants provide "Pay Per Lead" commissions which pay you for each time someone signs up through a form the merchant provides.

Most Merchants use a Pay Per Sale method where, obviously, you are paid per each sale you have made. Some Merchants pay a flat rate (say $30.00 per sale), whereas some will pay you a percentage of the total sale (say 10% per total sale).

So, let's pretend that Julie purchased a $100.00 product from the Merchant Website whom you are an Affiliate with. Let's say that the Merchant pays you 15% of each sale... guess what? Julie's purchase just made you $15.00! Not bad.

I hope this Article explained the basics of Affiliate Marketing and how it works.

The World Wide Web could be considered a synonym for opportunity. Millions of Internet entrepreneurs are finding new ways to make money online, as the opportunities for building home based businesses online are growing everyday. Existing businesses are using the Internet as a vehicle for marketing their products and services online while at the same time brand new businesses are getting started with only a home computer and a determination to succeed. The general landscape of commerce has changed forever.

One of the most exciting developments of Internet marketing that is making many entrepreneurs rich is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing could be the future of marketing and replacement for much of traditional paid advertising because affiliate marketing only cost the advertiser when the advertising is effective. In any affiliate program there is a host web site and affiliates. Affiliates advertise for the host web site using banners, text links, and e-mails with embedded text links and when a web search surfer clicks through from an affiliate link to the host site and makes a purchase the affiliate is paid either a set fee or a commission based on the affiliate agreement.

According to Paul Majestyck of MakeAFortuneOnTheNet , "Affiliate marketing has proven to be so profitable that some people are making a fortune on the net solely through affiliate programs." These affiliates are basically advertising agents earning profits by selling other people's products and services. This means that the affiliate can concentrate on the primary object of generating targeted traffic and promoting affiliate products.

The potential for making money in affiliate programs is virtually unlimited but affiliates need to choose the right programs to maximize the chances of success. One of the most important aspects of choosing affiliate programs to promote is to choose products and services that would be of interest to the affiliate's current traffic base. For example, a webmaster operating a web design firm is going to be most successful promoting affiliate programs for products that would interest those who are building new web sites. Potential products and services to promote might include search engine optimization services, blog template design and implementation services, Internet marketing, web content and merchant account services. There is a much greater chance of making sales when the affiliate links are relevant to the market of the affiliate web site. A web designer is not going to have much success promoting affiliate links for vitamins or other unrelated products. It is all about targeting qualified prospects.

There is no doubt that affiliate marketing will continue to grow in the future creating even greater opportunities for entrepreneurs all over the Internet.