Starting from the beginning, an affiliate program is a method of recruiting sales people who work to sell a product or service for a mother website in return for a financial reward. This usually ranges from 3% to 100%. Needless to say, the more you manage to sell, the more commission you would earn. Sometimes this also means residual income would be generated. The merchant that recruits affiliates profits greatly from this arrangement since their affiliates greatly increase traffic in ways that would not have been otherwise possible.
The concept of an affiliate program is the brainchild and offshoot of Amazon.com. The CEO of this amazing site, Jess Bezos, is responsible for promoting this idea. In 1996, when this concept was first announced, it took people by storm. Amazon.com literally hand-held their affiliates by offering them everything they needed right from websites to marketing tools and strategies. In return, the affiliate would have to “capture” the attention of people who were interested in the products. Whenever these people would visit the website of the merchant and make a purchase, the affiliate would earn a percentage of the profits.
There are three types of payments offered to the affiliates in an affiliate program:
(1) pay per sale,
(2) pay per click, and lastly,
(3) pay per lead.
In the first method, the merchant pays the affiliate a certain amount of money every time there is a sale. The pay per click is, as you can understand from its name, a payment that the merchant pays the affiliate every time someone clicks on the link that takes these surfers to the website of the merchant. Lastly, you have pay per head, which means that the affiliate would earn money every time a lead is generated.
The affiliate program can be an excellent method of building yourself a source for residual income. There are two models of affiliate marketing. The first one is the multiple-tier marketing system that is better known as “network marketing” whereby the affiliate earnings increase with every person that they recruit. The second type is the residual affiliate program whereby the affiliate earns continuous returns not only from the leads they generate, but also every time that particular person bought the promoted product or service.
The affiliate program is so popular because it promotes a win-win situation for both the merchant and the affiliate. The merchant gets excellent advertising mileage and increased, targeted traffic to their website, while the affiliate uses all the tools and help offered by the merchant to earn excellent revenues for themselves.
In other words, an affiliate program is a novel method to harness the power of the internet to generate wealth. More and more people discover this method of earning and join the hundreds of excellent affiliate programs available on the Net. While some affiliates succeed beyond their wildest imagination, others fail. Those who can be labeled as successful are those that can generate not only targeted traffic but also conversions that generate wealth. Meanwhile, the failures are usually associated with marketing that causes negative results or bad reputations.
