Ideas made easy: The world of affiliate marketing

Welcome back, addicted readers!

I'm sure you've been waiting patiently for my next mind-blowing article and it is my pleasure to inform you that it won't be long. In fact, a few sentences from now you'll be knee-deep in affiliate marketing slang! Read on if ye dare....

I decided to tantilize you a little bit more before we get into the real juicy details of affiliate marketing so todays article focuses on primarily the advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing without actually going into detail ( each topic hereafter will focus on a particular topic in detail ).

Affiliate Marketing: This is a system of revenue sharing between one site (the affiliate merchant) which features an ad or content designed to drive traffic to another site (the advertiser). The affiliate will receive a fee based on the amount of traffic generated.

As an affiliate, your job is to drive traffic to the merchants sites. Sounds pretty simple? Well it is to some degree. There are a wide range of merchants available on the internet and you can basically choose whatever genre of products/services you want. The hard part is driving high quality traffic to your site in order to make a profit and it is this that we will discuss in the future. Let's talk more about the overall concept a bit more first!

The figure below illustrates the 'circle of life' for an affiliate. The campaigns ( ie. free magazine subscription ) are created by the merchant who typically works through an affiiliate network. There are some cases where larger companies such as Amazon run their own affiliate network but in most cases these are run by seperate entities such as MaxBounty. The affiliate network provides the connection between affiliates and merchants. It is there responsibility to provide the compaigns and tracking for a host of merchants which are provided all in one convenient place for the affiliates.



In the case of MaxBounty, there are dozens of merchants providing a wide range of campaigns for pretty much any affiliate website you want to run. It is this network that provides you with 'creatives' or text/graphic banners and it is they who end up paying you. Most networks allow you to sign up for free but there is almost always an interview process so you have to have an existing site ( or at least a damn good idea ) in order to get approved. I would suggest you start with the idea first and then work on signing up with affiliate networks.

Even though I am going to focus on sites that are primarly dependant on affiliate networks, you should not assume that this it the only type of site that can take advantage of these facilities. If you have a niche content-based site and you're looking to monetize it , then you should definitely consider looking into affiliate networks as a possible income source.