What is an Affilliate?

For the purpose of this discussion an Affiliate is a person who promotes a web business (Merchant), for which he or she is rewarded with a commission/payment for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his or her efforts

Payment is made based on a certain value, either fixed fee or percentage for each visit (known as Pay per Click), registrant (Pay per Lead), or sale (Pay per Sale) or any combination of these.

Why do Merchants use Affiliates?

Merchants like Affiliates because they are paid on performance which means the Merchants have no marketing expenses unless the Affiliate produces results.
Affiliates provide the Merchants with an extremely cost effective way of maximising exposure of their products or service.

Why become an Affiliate?

Its Free to sign up as an Affiliate
As an Affiliate you can work part time or full time depending on your circumstances.
It provides you with the opportunity to create a substantial residual income.
You can work at this alongside your regular job until you find your feet.
It makes you the owner of your own small business.

How do I become an Affiliate?

First you must decide which type of program you would like to promote. Think about your interests. Its a lot easier to promote a product or service you are interested in yourself.
Have you bought something recently that has an Affiliate program?....Not sure?.....Find out like this, just type in your browser the product or service you have bought followed by + affiliate.
Example : holidays+affiliate . Now press search.

You will see a list of Affiliate programmes available for Holidays.Try this with your chosen product.

If you can't decide on a product to promote try looking at some of the Affiliate Network sites like Clickbank . Its free to sign up as an Affiliate. Clickbank acts as a middle man between the Marketer and Affiliate. Here you will find around 10,000 products from all areas available to promote so there is something for everyone.

When you sign up you are given a unique code to copy and paste into your blog or web site so whenever someone clicks one of your adverts it is registered to your account. Everything is automated and Clickbank collect payment from the Marketer and deposit in your account. Depending on your earnings a cheque is usually sent to you on the 1st and 15th of each month.

You are able to track and monitor all your account activity and the statistics provide you with the tools to target your advertising effectively.

I will go into Clickbank in more detail in my next post. If you're new to this business I hope this has been helpful to you.

Thanks for reading

Johnathan