An Affiliate marketing program is where a company offers to pay you a set amount for either a click from your website, or a set amount for visitors signing up (referral), or even a percentage of a purchase made by visitors as a result of being referred from your website (commission).

Even if visitors don’t make a purchase immediately, almost all programs offer cookie duration, normally
consisting of 30 - 90 days. This means that as long as the visitors have the cookie in their cache (browser), you’ll still receive a profit from a future sale.

The biggest amount of time in maintaining your site will be searching and implementing affiliations with various companies to ensure you are getting the highest payout. Even though there’s a lot of money in affiliate marketing, you have to take he time to search for the best programs and payouts.

One thing that you may not be happy with, is the idea of other companies banners being posted on your website. If you use too many banners or links on any web page, it can confuse and help to irritate your visitors. Try and focus on just a couple of banners or links to drive traffic to. More than one animated element on a web page can be very distracting as well.

Affiliate tracking can be an issue. Once you have applied to become an affiliate for a company or ad network, they will usually supply you with a personalized link or affiliate code. It is very important that you implement this code into your page correctly, or you might accidentally send visitors to the company without receiving any profit or statistics.

A majority of snippets in the code will contain a unique user ID, which the company uses to distinguish which site sent traffic. It is best to cloak these ids and codes to prevent misuse by other affiliates or prying eyes.