This article is written by:
Singapore Internet Marketing Expert Dennis Bay
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Secret 2, Affiliate Marketing
So what is affiliate marketing?
First of all, here’s the basic concept:
Online merchants can either sell products themselves or recruit thousands of affiliates to sell their products for them.
However, an affiliate does not have to physically sell the products themselves. All they have to do is refer potential buyers to visit the online merchants websites via a special affiliate tracking link.
Usually this link can be included either in a graphic banner on a website, an email,an affiliate’s website or even on a blog.
Now here are some commonly used terms:
1. Online merchant – an ecommerce enabled website that sells some form of products or services online.
2. Affiliate – an independent agent that helps refer potential customers/service users or new members to an online merchant website and gets rewarded in some way for some actions which are performed by those potential customers/users or members. Usually the affiliate is rewarded in the form of commissions, i.e. money!
3. Pay per sale – this is when an affiliate gets rewarded a certain amount of commission for a sale that occured on the online merchant’s website from someone that the affiliate referred to the website.
4. Pay per click – this is when an affiliate gets rewarded a certain amount of commission when someone that the affiliate referred to the online merchant clicks on some advertisements or banners.
5. Pay per lead – this is when an affiliate gets rewarded a certain amount of commission when someone refered by the affiliate fills in a survey, enquiry or quotation form on the online merchant’s website.
6. Affiliate referal link – this is a special linking code that an online merchant issues to each affiliate so that anyone who clicks on that link will be sent to the online merchant’s website and in the process, the online merchant is able to credit that referal to that particular affiliate. Usually an affiliate link looks like this, http://www.merchantwebsite.com/affiliate/id=12345 where the id=12345 is actually the unique number assigned to each different affiliate.
7. Cookies tracking – ‘Cookies’ are sort of like mini tracking bookmarks left on a website visitor’s computer after the person visits the online merchant’s website. These contain important information that will allow the online merchant to credit referals and commissions back to the correct affiliate even if the referal visitor comes back to the merchant’s website a few weeks later and purchases some products.
So making money on the internet as an affiliate is pretty straightforward.
Sell other people’s products and get paid commissions.
And the best part is most affiliate programs offered by online merchants are free to join.
There is no requirement for the affiliate to buy anything first before becoming an affiliate!
The classic story is Amazon.com which is supposed to be the first online merchant to start a successful affiliate program.
Amazon.com sells primarily books and they knew that there are thousands if not millions of websites or web pages on the internet which write about the books that they sell or some sort of related topics.
So if they could leverage these people who write these webpages to become their sales force, Amazon.com will suddenly have tons of traffic and tons of referal visitors.
But best of all, these ‘affiliates’ who placed Amazon.com’s affiliate links on their web pages can also benefit from being paid commissions for each book sold!
Today, many of the internet’s highest paid affiliates run websites dedicated to recommending Amazon.com products.
And after this success story, many other merchants followed to adopt their own affiliate programs, eg. Ebay, Barnes and Nobles etc.
Now, we even have affiliate program networks. These are companies that help manage affiliate programs for a large network of online merchants and offer affiliates who join these networks a large variety of products and services to recommend on their websites.
You can find a lot of affiliate networks online just be doing a search on Google.
And one of the more popular affiliate networks is ClickBank. Check it out!
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I'm Dennis Bay And I'm an Internet Marketer based in Singapore. 
