Home Internet Business

The term “Affiliate Program” (also called an “Associate” program at times) refers to the numerous ways you can earn money either through marketing and advertising a merchant’s product or from actual sales of their products on your web site.  Basically you are selling other company’s goods or services for them and in return they are cutting you in for a percentage or a flat rate of the sale. 
 

Much less intrusive and annoying then the old bulk email craze of the late 90’s this method of reaching the public has the unique benefit of utilizing existing web pages and traffic to push the products and or services that the affiliate needs to present to the masses, and as such revenues that would in the past have gone into the pockets of large research and advertising firms are instead being shared with the hardy web site owner who is willing to put that splash screen or link on their page. If nothing else the lessons learned in the kickback against pop-up advertisements and bulk emailers show that there are limits to what people will stand for when it comes to invasive advertising – unless the product being advertised is something that they really want to see! That is why targeting is so important, and why affiliate programs can be so successful.
 

As with any good idea however there are caveats and exceptions – most often greedy web site owners will place too many non-related or untargeted advertisements on their page in hopes of gaining great amounts of money, only to find that just like bulk emailers of the past they have killed the proverbial golden goose!  The best affiliate program in the world can’t make money for the web page designer who doesn’t put a little thought into which products or services he presents and how he presents them.
 

You can in effect think of affiliate programs as the ‘vending machines of the 2000’s’ because that is how they work – all the work and stocking is handled by the people who ‘own’ the machines, you only supply a little oversight and a place to store the equipment.  In exchange for allowing the machines (or in this case the code) to be stored on your property you are given a cut of any profits that are generated, as stipulated by whatever contract you agree to.  Since most affiliate sites work by posting links to the merchants site or ‘backend’ methods to identify where the link came from has to be incorporated into the link so that commissions will be tracked and given to the site from which the customer followed the link.