Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing. What's all the buz about affiliate marketing? What is affiliate marketing? That is when someone (an affiliate) partners with a merchant to promote (marketing) their product for a commission of the sale. Affiliate programs are also known as associate, referral and bounty programs.

For the merchant, partnering with an affiliate is an inexpensive marketing strategy that increases sales, generates traffic, and gathers leads for their opt-in list of names.

Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to start an online business and begin generating income immediately. You don't need a product of your own, you don't have to keep an inventory, you don't have to ship the product when it sells, and you don't even need your own website.

Unfortunately, not all merchants furnish a website for their affiliates. But their are a plethera of marketers out there that are looking for affiliates to market their product, and most of them pay very nicely. All you need to do is build a website to promote them on.

How does the Merchant know that the visitor came from YOUR site?
As an affiliate you will be assigned a special link coded with an ID that is unique to you. Software on the merchant’s site tracks sales and leads generated by that unique affiliate link. For example, Amazon's homepage URL is: http://www.amazon.com. However, as an Amazon.com affiliate, your affiliate ID could be something like aloe2750. Therefore your link to the Amazon.com homepage would look something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/aloe2750

By attaching your affiliate link to a banner ad, small graphic or a text link
you earn a referral fee from every sale generated through that link.

There are affiliates who literally make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year by simply promoting other peoples merchandise online. A great example of this is Rosalind Gardner. An air-traffic controller for the government for twenty years. In 1998, knowing she wasn't going to make it to retirement with that job, she decided to look to the internet for another method of income. In 2000 she quit her government job, and in 2002 she made $436,797.00 selling other peoples stuff.

To read her complete story, see The SuperAffiliateHandbook

If you have any desires of making money through affilaite marketing, I highly recommend her book. It is filled with everything you need to know to become a successful Super Affiliate, without making the mistakes that she, and other affiliates like her, made through trial and error.