Affiliate programs are very popular right now and have been for a while. While you might have heard of many people making money with affiliate or associate programs as they are often called, you may not know exactly what an affiliate program is. A very simple way to explain an affiliate program is that it is an arrangement between an online merchant website and an affiliate website where the merchant website pays the affiliate website to send them traffic.
The Details
The details of each affiliate program really vary from affiliate program to affiliate program. Generally the affiliate website posts links to the merchant website and is paid according to how many people go to the merchant program via the affiliate link, or the number of people that buy something as a result of the affiliate website or website link. Payment arrangements vary and can be based just on traffic, on purchases, as well as getting other people to join the affiliate program. If you work hard and post links on all of the pages of a website you can make a lot of money through affiliate programs.
Why Merchants Develop Affiliate Programs
Many merchants develop affiliate programs because it is one of the best ways to sell products or services online. Affiliate programs work because they get the word out to the world about a company, what it is about, and why consumers should check it out. Affiliate programs are also quite cheap to start up as they are based on affiliate members future actions so there are no funds to be paid out ahead of time so these programs are cheap marketing for the merchant! If you think about it, affiliates are basically advertising for the merchant all over the Internet and if they do not generate any traffic they do not get paid. For the affiliates that do generate traffic and sales they will get paid after the money has come in, so the merchant is always ahead of the financial game and the affiliate will be guaranteed payment.
Affiliate History
Affiliate programs are everywhere these days, but they weren’t always so prevalent. It wasn’t until 1996 that the marketing trend came to be when the CEO and founder of Amazon.com came up with this strategy. If you take a look around Amazon you will see that they are essentially one big merchant with a bunch of small affiliates advertising on their website. The way that Amazon works is that affiliates post information for products and then Amazon gets a cut of the profit as well as collects the money and ships the product. As you can see, affiliate programs can really pay big and Amazon is a good example of that.
A Growing Trend
It’s important to note that you do not have to have a business such as Amazon to be successful with affiliate programs. You can be a merchant of any sort and create an affiliate program just to create some noise and some interest in your website, your products, or your service. Affiliate programs have now been around for more than ten years and they continue to be used because they work. Whether you are the merchant or the affiliate there is a lot of money to be made with a relatively simple program, so why not give it a shot? You’ve probably wasted more time doing things that have made you less money than you will make with one of these programs.
