What is Affiliate Marketing?

If you are into affiliate marketing, this means that you are the "middle-man" between the owner of the products and their customers. The owner of the products and services that are being sold online is called the merchant. But the merchant does not always market their services directly to the customers. For that job, merchants often rely on middlemen like you, who are the affiliates.

You are the salesman, who receives his money as a part of the commission that he makes from his sales. So if you make no sale, you get no money.

To promote a product in order to earn revenue from the sale, you will need an affiliate program. The programs actually help you by driving the traffic of visitors to your site. It is very difficult to choose the right affiliate programs, since there are so many of them out in the Web world, and only a few that you can blindly trust.

More importantly, when the companies that you are working for go under, they might not even let you know, so that your payouts turn out to be very small, and sometimes, months go by and you never get to see your payday.

Another disadvantage of affiliate marketing is banners. If a company gets its banners all over, a lot of confusion is created in the web sites so that the visitors start to face too many options. In such cases, they become easily overwhelmed and deterred.

Affiliate tracking could also turn out to be a bit of a problem. The companies will assign special code to you that you have to use in order to report your sales. This code assures that no other affiliate gets your pay by mistake.

You must have this unique affiliate code pasted in your site correctly and without errors so that you do not lose out. Or else you may send a lot of potential clients without any reimbursements.

In order to look for an affiliate program, all you have to do is go to the search engines and type in the keywords. You will get many affiliate programs displayed soon, but before you make your choice, it is better that you read up the reviews and see whether people had any problems while using those programs.

The affiliate marketing mainly depends on the craft you possess in marketing goods and services to the clients. This will determine your success and failure in this business. You can start to use the available tested marketing methods after adding certain tweaks of your own creativity to them. You will get your pay according to the sales you make and this situation turns out to be pretty simple and easy.