Being an affiliate is basically being a salesman or a repersenitive of an established business this can be a multibillion dollar corporation or even a very small home based business and the word affiliate is primarily based on internet run businesses.



Basically as an affiliate your an online salesman selling and promoting other businesses or peoples products and services and when you make a sale you get a commission this can range anywhere from 2 %to as high as 60% of the total cost of the product you sold.

Almost all the big name stores like Walmart, Circuit City, Staples, EBay and thousands of others offer an affiliate program you can join for free online it's simply a matter of looking them up in the search engines and joining.

Affiliate marketing has grown into a multibillion dollar business and some people make a full time living just being an affiliate of hundreds of different programs in fact there are literally thousands of affiliate programs you can join and its growing everyday!

There are many different ways to promote affiliate programs the most common is using what's called PPC advertising what this is you pay for traffic to your website Google offers the most powerful PPC program simply because it is the most used search engine.

But Google can be the most expensive PPC program to use to promote your affiliate web pages and more often than not you will end up losing money rather than making it.

Simply put if you were to get 1000 visitors and it cost you 75 cents per visit and you make no sales well now you have spent $750.00 in marketing and did not make a dime!

Understand that when promoting anything on the internet especially affiliate programs it can be a risky business until you learn the ropes remember there are people making well over six figures a year but they are masters at promoting affiliate sites.

If you are going to get serious at promoting any affiliate web site or url no matter what you have been told you simply must have your own domain name and hosting this is especially true to people who are new at this.

To explain all this goes well beyond this article there are many expert sources that you can get information that will guide you step by step and take you through the learning curve so you don't end up making a lot of costly mistakes.

When it's all said and done being an affiliate is simply being an online salesman for a company promoting their products.

The real battle is getting people to see your site and then once that is done the sales page needs to be good so the visitors will purchase your products you are selling.

This can be a very difficult task to accomplish in fact its this part of affiliate marketing that can make you into a great success or failure.

Before you jump into marketing an affiliate site do your home work and remember treat it like a business because it really is one