So www.Widgets.com sells widgets. You happen to collect widgets as a hobby. You build a site about your widget collection and on that site you have an affiliate link to www.Widgets.com. Whenever anyone clicks through that link and buys a Widget, you get a percentage of the sale. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Some companies run their affiliate programs in-house (eVitamins for example). Others use affiliate management companies. The big four affiliate management companies are:
- Commission Junction
- Linkshare
- Performics
- BeFree (owned by Commission Junction)
I'm also an affiliate of Affiliate Fuel. Affiliate Fuel is a pay-per-lead and pay-per-registration outfit.
The nice thing about affiliate marketing? Anyone can do it. All you need is a computer. Depending on the product or service you are marketing, you might not even need a web site. The lead and registration generation I do for Affiliate Fuel is exclusively through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing, mainly Google AdWords, and to a lesser extent Yahoo Search Marketing (previously known as Overture).
Personally, and based on my experience since launching my first affiliate marketing effort in July of 2000, I think it has gotten much harder to make money in affiliate marketing. There's a more competition, the search engines are much less tolerant of affiliate marketing sites and links, new rules prevent bidding on trademarks in PPC, advances in spyware and mal-ware, a general decrease in commissions... all of this and more has made it difficult to start a new site, drive traffic to it, and sell stuff for someone else.
Nevertheless, if you are looking for a way to potentially make some money on the Internet in your spare time, affiliate marketing remains an option worth investigating.
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