Basic affiliate marketing principles

Let’s review the basic terminology and principles of affiliate marketing. Unless you are selling your own products, your entry-level product will probably be an affiliate product. This means the product will be offered by offered by an
affiliate merchant, and administered through an affiliate program.

Affiliate marketing is basically a pay-for-performance sales system. Companies give you a link, banner, button, or other code to put on your web site or in an email, and they will pay you for sales made when someone clicks that link or
banner. Some of the biggest companies in the world - Amazon, Target,Hallmark, LL. Bean, and Verizon - all pay affiliate commissions to people who buy through affiliate links.

An affiliate commission is like any other commission - when you make a sale, you get paid. The commission may be a percentage of the retail price, or it may be a flat dollar amount. There are other forms of affiliate compensation - for example,
some companies pay per LEAD, not per SALE. But for our purposes, we’ll concentrate on commission-based affiliate sales.

An affiliate merchant is an individual, or a company, that pays your commission on one of their affiliate products. As I explained earlier, some affiliate merchants are huge corporations that offer thousands of products. But other affiliate merchants are individual folks like you and me. They have developed a product or a service, and would rather pay affiliate commissions than spend money on expensive advertising. Even if they have to pay a 50% or higher commission, they consider affiliate marketing a low-risk form of advertising. After all, they only pay for actual sales made - not for hit-or-miss ads that may never make a sale.

As you can imagine, some big merchants like Amazon have thousands of affiliates, in many different countries. Just keeping track of all those affiliates, their names and addresses and links, as well as issuing checks in the correct currencies, would be an administrative nightmare!

So most affiliate merchants use an affiliate program provider to help them keep track of affiliate links and commissions, and to issue payments via check or electronic transfer. In exchange for a small percentage or transaction fee, the affiliate program provider will keep track of your affiliate contact information, issue affiliate identifications (affiliate IDs), and send out the affiliate link code for your customers to click on.

Affiliate program providers also keep track of commission amounts, and send payments to affiliates like you, either via check, Paypal, or electronic transfer. It’s free to join an affiliate program provider. The largest and most popular affiliate program providers in the U.S. are:

• Clickbank
• Commission Junction
• BeFree / Reporting.net
• LinkShare
• ClixGalore
• Performics
• Affiliate Traders
• Dark Blue
• FineClicks
• Web Sponsors
• ShareASale
• QuinStreet

Literally dozens of new affiliate products are launched every week. There are thousands of merchants, selling almost every type of hard goods, digital goods, or services through affiliate programs. To see what I mean, sign up for a few of the programs above, and begin to browse their list of merchants and products.

In addition to these big affiliate program providers, many companies run their own, small-scale affiliate programs. To find these smaller programs and their affiliate products, simply type the product or market into a Google searchbar, followed by +affiliate or +affiliate+program. It may take a bit of digging, but you just might find the perfect product by using the search engines.

Affiliate Program information Related

• Are You a Scatterbrained Affiliate?
• The Economy and Affiliate Marketing: Should You Worry?
• Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
• The Holiday Shopping Season
• Top 14 Tips for Affiliate Success
• How to Target Holiday Shoppers
• Top mistakes most affiliate bloggers make
• Criteria for choosing product
• Researching an entry-level product
• residual affiliate programs