What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Essentially affiliate marketing is the process of promoting goods or services for an online merchant in exchange for commission. Traffic is sent to the merchant via tracked links. These links typically contain tracking ID's embedded in them, or in some cases, by using a specific landing page on the vendors site. These click throughs are tracked and sales incurred by these clicks result in a commission being paid. Most affiliate programs use cookies to track repeat visitors, this allows the affiliate to retain sales months, and some times even years, after they sent the shopper in the first place.

Commission rates vary drastically not only between individual affiliate programs, but also between industries. Typically the payout percentages are higher for programs selling herbal supplements, where hard goods such as CD's, Electronics, Computers, etc, tend to draw a much lower commission rate.

Rates truly vary between everywhere from 1% to 90%, although 20-30% is more common.

What do I need to do to get into Affiliate Marketing?

To be successful on a long term basis with affiliate marketing it is best to have your own web site. In many cases members of a specific affiliate program will create a web site specifically devoted to on product, or one theme or products. Here they will promote the items and essentially "Pre-Sell" them to the customer. When the customer is ready to order, the site will transfer them to the affiliates order page, or relevant area of their site where the transaction is completed.

If you already own a site and have not yet implemented a means to generating any income, you may want to consider finding an affiliate program (or product) which complements the content of your site. Place banners promoting your product in appropriate locations and, depending on your site traffic, could make anywhere from a few extra spending dollars, to literally thousands a month without having to do a thing!

If you do not own a site or have any interest in starting one up, but are still interested in making a few dollars with affiliate marketing, another option is to promote products by using pay per click search engines (such as Google, Overture (soon to be Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions), GoClick, Kanoodle, Mamma, Enhance, or one of many others.) One strong disadvantage of this is that it will require a larger initial investment as costs per click tend to be high for strong converting products. While you will likely make your money back and more, this will considerable cut into your profits. Using PPC exclusively also poses another issue - when you stop paying for traffic, the commissions stop. At least when you have your own site, you will still get sales trickling in even long after you stop actively promoting products.

For more on Affiliate Marketing, View our Selection of Affiliate Articles!