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What is affiliate marketing?

The dictionary defines "affiliate" (the verb) as "to bring or receive into close connection as a member or branch." Our version of the term as it's used in ecommerce: to establish a relationship with other merchants to sell your products, giving them a percentage of the sale.

Affiliate programs essentially work two ways. You can recruit affiliates to sell your products for a commission, thus increasing your "virtual sales force." Or you can sign up to be an affiliate for other peoples' products, linking to them and becoming part of their virtual sales force. Many people do both. The idea is that both parties make more money than they would have otherwise.

The whole concept of affiliate programs started with Amazon.com in 1996, when they realized the value of having the legions of Web sites out there referring buyers or potential buyers to their products. Amazon currently has over 900,000 "associates" (as they are now calling them). As of April 2003, they are offering associates 5% of the sale price of retail items and 15% of the sale of individually linked books listed in their catalogue.

It is widely known that Affiliate marketing has become one of the fastest growing industries on the Internet and has now officially proven itself to be a sure way of being able to generate passive income. Yet just like all industries, if you don’t understand the fundamentals you will never be able to succeed.

Considering the amount of competition that exists in the affiliate marketing world, knowledge has become power and the more you can understand the more you will succeed.

This step by step guide on affiliate marketing focuses on the basics of setting up your own affiliate system so you can be selling products and services online within the next 60 minutes. Inside you will learn, how to set up your program through clickbank, which networks to find the best affiliate offers through, how to spot hot offers, which offers to stay away from, how to set up proper reporting and much more.