To determine the concerns of affiliate marketing we need to first define affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is quite simply a marketing concept that lets others do word of mouth advertising for your web site, with you paying them for this advertising according to results obtained, usually in a percentage of sales, but sometimes in other ways.

As an example, if a person writes and prepares professional resumes he may use affiliate marketing two different ways: as a pays affiliates and as an affiliate who gets paid. He will encourage other websites to become affiliates and if he charges an average of $100 for a resume package, he may pay fifty percent of that, or fifty dollars to any website that links to his site when someone from that site comes to his and purchases a resume. For instance, a community calendar website may have a banner ad up for the resume website. When someone on the community calendar site links to the resume site and buys a resume, the owner of the community calendar site will receive fifty dollars.

As a person who receives payment as an affiliate, the resume website owner probably links to one of the companies that offers career counseling, one that offers email resume distribution, and one that sells books on job search techniques. When people on the resume website link to one of those sites and buy one of the offered products, the owner of the resume site will receive a percentage of the profits. In this way all of the website owners are helping each other and rather than paying large dollar amounts for advertising that may or may not work, they are only paying for results. The affiliates get a chance to make money simply by having links on their websites, and find that the websites can then make them money 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The concerns of this type of affiliate marketing are:

1) how much money will I make
2) how will I get paid?
3) and is this for real?

To answer the first question, it varies a lot. It depends on the type of service offered, the demand, and how many visitors your website attracts. However, some website owners make quite a bit of money from affiliate marketing when they have a lot of traffic.

To answer the second question, you will usually be paid by check, but some companies do online payment through one of the reputable services that offer this type of arrangement.

Is this for real? Yes, it usually is. Of course you should read the FAQ's on any website that you are interested in as an affiliate, and ask any questions of them via email in order to make sure that you are familiar with what they are doing and that it is a good fit for you.

However, affiliate marketing is a good way for many people to make extra money and for many websites to benefit from traffic at other sties.