How Affiliate Marketing Programs Work

Most affiliate programs are free to join. When you enter an affiliate relationship with a merchant, you agree to place links to the merchant’s site on your site. The merchant agrees to pay you a commission for the traffic you send.

Merchants offering affiliate programs pay in three basic ways:
• Pay-per-sale (or cost-per-sale). When you send the merchant a customer who subsequently makes a purchase, the merchant pays you. Your commission may be a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount for the sale. Amazon’s Associates Program is an example of this arrangement.
• Pay-Per-Click (or cost-per-click). The merchant pays you for every click on the link directing the visitor to the merchant’s site. The referred visitor does not need to purchase anything for you to get your commission.
• Pay-per-lead (or cost-per-lead). You send the merchant a visitor who subsequently signs up as a lead. This means the visitor completes an online form on the merchant’s site. The merchant may then pass the lead to the sales department or sell the lead information to another company.

Essentially, Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice where you can sign up to sell your others products for a commission. In the Get Rich Click™ spirit of making money while investing little or no money of your own, affiliate programs are one of the very best ways to profit from the Internet. Affiliate marketing benefits both the affiliate and the merchant. As an affiliate, you can generate income from traffic to your website/blog. If you choose your affiliations well, you also increase the value to your site visitors. Meanwhile, merchants get more traffic to their sites. Because this traffic arrives through a referral, it’s predisposed to make a purchase. Assuming the customer is satisfied, affiliate marketing can be a win/win/win business model for everyone involved.

Businesses find affiliate marketing attractive because most programs use a “pay for performance” model. Compare this to traditional forms of advertising. Creating a television ad and buying the air time for it is expensive — and there is no guarantee the ad will be a success. In online affiliate marketing, businesses pay only for results.

For example, Amazon Associates, the affiliate marketing program of amazon.com, has marketed amazon.com across millions of websites since July 1996. Through this program, Amazon has acquired millions of customers without incurring the expenses associated with traditional branding campaigns or maintaining a dedicated sales force. Amazon Associates is among the largest and most successful online affiliate programs.

Amazon.com’s main site is made up of millions of pages. As an Amazon Associate, you can create an e-mail campaign that points people to any one of those pages and include your affiliate code as an embedded link. Whenever a recipient clicks through and buys that Amazon product, you earn a commission.