What Is An Affiliate Program?
Author: Roderick Allen Eash

Starting from the beginning, an affiliate program is a method
of recruiting sales people who work to sell a product or service
for a mother website in return for a financial reward. This
usually ranges from 3% to 100%. Needless to say, the more you
manage to sell, the more commission you would earn. Sometimes
this also means residual income would be generated. The merchant
that recruits affiliates profits greatly from this arrangement
since their affiliates greatly increase traffic in ways that
would not have been otherwise possible.

The concept of an affiliate program is the brainchild and
offshoot of http://Amazon.com. The CEO of this amazing site,
Jess Bezos, is responsible for promoting this idea. In 1996,
when this concept was first announced, it took people by storm.
http://Amazon.com literally hand-held their affiliates by
offering them everything they needed right from websites to
marketing tools and strategies. In return, the affiliate would
have to "capture" the attention of people who were interested in
the products. Whenever these people would visit the website of
the merchant and make a purchase, the affiliate would earn a
percentage of the profits.

There are three types of payments offered to the affiliates in
an affiliate program: (1) pay per sale, (2) pay per click, and
lastly, (3) pay per lead. In the first method, the merchant pays
the affiliate a certain amount of money every time there is a
sale. The pay per click is, as you can understand from its name,
a payment that the merchant pays the affiliate every time
someone clicks on the link that takes these surfers to the
website of the merchant. Lastly, you have pay per head, which
means that the affiliate would earn money every time a lead is
generated.

The affiliate program can be an excellent method of building
yourself a source for residual income. There are two models of
affiliate marketing. The first one is the multiple-tier
marketing system that is better known as "network marketing"
whereby the affiliate earnings increase with every person that
they recruit. The second type is the residual affiliate program
whereby the affiliate earns continuous returns not only from the
leads they generate, but also every time that particular person
bought the promoted product or service.

The affiliate program is so popular because it promotes a
win-win situation for both the merchant and the affiliate. The
merchant gets excellent advertising mileage and increased,
targeted traffic to their website, while the affiliate uses all
the tools and help offered by the merchant to earn excellent
revenues for themselves.

In other words, an affiliate program is a novel method to
harness the power of the internet to generate wealth. More and
more people discover this method of earning and join the
hundreds of excellent affiliate programs available on the Net.
While some affiliates succeed beyond their wildest imagination,
others fail. Those who can be labeled as successful are those
that can generate not only targeted traffic but also conversions
that generate wealth. Meanwhile, the failures are usually
associated with marketing that causes negative results or bad
reputations.


About The Author: Roderick A Eash is an Internet Marketer with
several streams of residual income. To find the best home based
business ideas and opportunities so you can work at home visit:
http://www.TheEashSyndicate.com