The goal of affiliate marketing is to recommend a site to your visitors and then you receive a commission on any sale that these visitors make. The merchant is happy because he has made another sale that he wouldn't have made otherwise, and the affiliate is happy because he benefits from the commission.



It could be that you already have set up a website and that you just add the required links to the merchant's website, eventually combined with a review of the product. The other option is to create a completely new site from scratch just to promote the particular product or service. The important thing is obviously that you would receive more money from commissions than it costs to create or run your website.

How do you get paid?

In principle, how you are paid will depend on the merchant. There are merchants that set up their own affiliate program and build everything up themselves while others choose to use existing billing and marketing solutions such as Clickbank or Commission Junction. Anyhow, in most cases, they will use a special type of software in order to assign a special link to each affiliate. The use of this link is not optional. The software can only track the sales all the affiliates if the affiliates use this special link in their promotion efforts. Some merchant still pay commissions by sending a check, others use PayPal for payment or a similar payment system.

How to pick the right products or services

This is a difficult question because there are literally thousands products sold online and in most cases, you can't tell which one is good and which one should be avoided. From the outside it's hard to tell as they usually all look pretty and promising. The two main factors that have the most influence on your income potential are:

1. how large are the commissions?

2. how well does the product or service sell?

So you will understand that the choice of which program you're going to promote is not really a detail and requires all your attention.

This choice of which product or service to promote, can be compared to picking stocks to invest in. In most cases, you will have far better results if you entirely comprehend what the company is doing. You should be more or less familiar with the products they sell or the kind of service they offer. The best thing is obviously if you have personally used the product or service yourself. Furthermore, it will be so much easier for you to write reviews or ads since you won't have to strain yourself to come up with the right things to write.

What also helps in the selection process is to limit yourself to only products that you are not embarrassed to promote. You're already promoting to your friends and relatives if you've gone to a really good restaurant or if you've seen a really cool movie. You do even if the owner doesn't pay you a commission. So why should you promote products that you'll feel comfortable recommending to your family and friends if they would ask you about it? Remember there are more products sold online than you have time to promote.

Another interesting factor is if the programs offers tools to ease the life of their affiliates when they are promoting. What we mean by that are things like banners, text links, and of course graphics, in short: things that you can directly put on your web site. Off course you're not obliged to use them; you can also model your own to it.

Last but not least there are the commission rates. My advice would be to look for affiliate programs with commission rates of minimum 50%. If possible, give preference to programs that pay commission on multiple levels. What does this mean? Suppose that someone buys the product through your link and this person is so enthusiastic about the product, that he decides to become an affiliate himself. If this person now makes a sale, you are still earning a commission on this sale. In the long term, this can make a huge difference.