What is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing, also known as internet marketing or online advertising, is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.

81% of affiliate programs today use revenue share (Cost per sale) as compensation method. The remaining 19% use Cost Per Action.

(Source : www.wikipedia.org)

If you are getting confused with the terminology used above then you need not worry at all as our solo objective is to make you familiar with affiliate marketing concept and  to help you learn how to make money online, the same way millions of people are doing.

Many of the companies, big and small, do various sales and brand promotion on Internet. These promotions can be:

• Brand promotion campaigns.

• Sales promotion campaigns.

• Campaigns to make people aware of services offered by the company.

• Others.

But practically it's not possible for the companies, even for companies like Yahoo or Google, to recruit thousands of people to promote their products and/or services over millions of websites and pay extraordinarily large amount of money for the manpower and campaign operations. And this weakness of companies (merchants/advertisers, used synonymously here) turns out to be extremely profitable for people like us.

Now the million dollar question which arises in everyone’s mind is that, how we can make use of this opportunity? We don’t own a product or service which we can offer online and even if we have a product or service we don’t have a platform to promote it. Well, if you’ll have a cursory look at the previous paragraph then you’ll realize that:

• Companies already have products and/or services which we don’t have.

• But we are the manpower which these companies need to advertise their product and services online.

If you understood what we just discussed above then you have already started thinking in the right direction and unfortunately if you are still confused then we would suggest you to read this a couple of times and I bet you won’t find it much difficult to understand.

The companies offer us to promote their products or services free of cost and we get paid if someone buys anything from the advertiser or follow the desired action, through our referral.  Now another million dollar question is, where is the platform using which we can promote products/services for advertisers?

So here is the list of platform you can use:

• Promoting through your own website.

• Through programs like Google Adwords, Overture etc (You need not have a website)

• Email campaigns (You need not have a website)

• Newsletter, discussion forums etc (You need not have a website)

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