An affiliate program is a partnership with a merchant were the affiliate earns a commission on sales/ or leads that the affiliate produces by referring visitors to the merchant site.

Affiliate programs are an ideal way of monetizing your site as they are:

• Free to Join
• Easy to set up ( copy and paste some code)

Type Of Affiliate Program

There are basically three types of affiliate programs:

• Pay-per-click -If someone clicks through a link the affiliate receives a small fee, usually $0.05 to $1.00 depending on your product.
• Pay-per-lead. -Visitors must give the merchant their contact details by to signing up for a newsletter, downloading a trial version of a software or similar. The merchant now has contact information for that customer (a lead) and the affiliate is paid for each lead.
• Pay-per-Sale-. By far the most common. The affiliate receives a share of the sale.

In addition you will also find many variations of the above plans two of the most popular being:

• Two-tier programs: Affiliates in these programs receive a commission on their own affiliate sales, as well as receiving commissions based on sales, clicks or leads stemming from their own site.
• Residual Programs: Merchants who receive regular payments from their customers (e.g. Web hosting) run this sort of affiliate program. Affiliates in these programs receive an ongoing share of these fees.

Affiliate programs are more difficult to set up then Google Adsense as you first have to locate relevant merchants, and because you are usually recommending the product or service you should be familiar with it.

Starting Tip

Most newcomers to affiliate marketing join lots of programs and attempt to promote them all. The most important thing is to very selective and start by only promoting 1 or 2.