In simple terms Affiliate Marketing is selling product or service for someone else.

Payment is usually by percentage of sale, fixed fee or CPA (Cost Per Action ie signing up for a survey)

There are hundreds of Affiliate Sites out there with some of the more popular being ClickBank, Commission Junction, Clix Galore and ShareASale.

Then there are thousands of companies and websites that run their own Affiliate Programs, such as us.

Affiliate Marketing as it relates to the internet has been around a very very long time. It started out as banner ads where webmasters would be paid per click. “Oh great, you sent someone to my site … have 1/4 c” It took a lot of traffic and clickthroughs to make any money.

Things changed when Google come to market with Adwords. Now you weren’t limited to placing tacky banners on your website, heck now you didn’t even need a website.

You could run up an ad, target the Affiliate link with a nice display link and away you went. Making commission on the sales and juggling to ensure the costs didn’t eat you alive.

It’s pretty much the same now except there are a bunch of more options, MSN Adcenter for advertising on Bing, Yahoo (Formerly Overture) for the yahoo search engine and assorted other options.

Banner ads are still around and you see them everyday. There are new hooks being tried all the time also. For a time Google had video ads that they would serve up in Adsense blocks.

Things are always changing and the most exciting thing I’ve seen of late has been iAds from Apple. Much more interactivity for the viewers without fully taking them away from the application they are using. It won’t take long for the Internet Marketing fraternity to come up with similar interactive ads, although at this stage I’m not sure how applicable it will be for the web.

There’s still money to be made, and untapped niches to explore, with more being created every day.

Best Wishes,

Shane

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