What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing Defined

Affiliate marketing is a popular method of promoting web based businesses. It involves the combination of all that website owners do to send traffic [i.e surfers] to a particular website so as to make those surfers to either click on certain links on that website, complete a form or buy something from it. If any of these things happens, then affiliate [ the one that sent the traffic] is paid a commission.

An affiliate marketer is like a company's salesman but without the company bearing any legal responsibilities for the salesman's insurance, sick pay, salary, holiday allowance or any such thing. He works when he likes, and only makes money when he manages to convince people to taken certain actions on the website of his merchant [i.e the owner of the website that he is promoting]

Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination of the three.

The affiliate marketing arrangement suits the merchants just fine as they do not make any payments to an affiliate until he or she gets results. Some e-commerce vendors use third party services provided by affiliate program networks who act as intermediary to monitor and track traffic or sales that are made possible by affiliates.

On the other hand, some e-commerce businesses have their own affiliate programs which they run by themselves. However, I will always advice to go through an affiliate marketing network so that you are protected in case of disputes

Affiliate marketing is so important that so many businesses owe a large percentage of their growth success and international expansion to this marketing method.

Today, affiliate marketing is the single fastest growing industry on the Internet.
It’s also true that affiliate marketing is one of the fastest, easiest and most creative ways for anyone to make easy money online and have a full time career on the Internet.

While your passions and expertise should be the most important factors in deciding your niche, it is worth knowing that the following sectors are presently the most active ones:

mobile phones, adult, gaming and other forms of entertainment, retail, gambling and associated products, finance, travel, braodband and other internet related services

From the affiliates point of view, these may not be the most profitable in-demand niches, but they are very popular. You may therefore seek to research into sub-niches within these major ones.