Affiliate programs are also known as associate programs, partner programs, reseller programs and sponsor programs.

In a general sense, these programs allow you to use any online advertising medium to share revenue with an affiliate merchant website, by receiving a portion of their income for delivering customers who result in sales, leads or traffic to the affiliate merchant website.

The popularity of affiliate marketing is very well realized now than earlier. This is prominent among the reasons for the high visibility of affiliate marketing programs among the ever growing number of affiliate marketers on a daily basis.

Latest web technology has enabled the affiliate marketers to get their statistics and income figures the moment they make an affiliate sale. It is now possible to use companies like PayPal for payment and receipt processing. This has highly curtailed the time that an affiliate marketer needs to wait for his payments to be collected from the merchants.

Today, both the merchants and the affiliates can see clearly that affiliate marketing can work for both of them. The merchant sees affiliate marketing today as the chance to advertise their products at a lower cost. The affiliates, on the other hand, sees affiliate marketing as an easy way of earning profits online by doing what they like most, and that is by creating websites.

Just as the reputation of affiliate marketing has gone up, similarly the attitude of people has enhanced with respect to affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is no more regarded as an inferior method of marketing by the merchants or as a secondary source of income by an affiliate marketer. Both merchants and affiliates regard affiliate marketing as a main source of profits and revenues.

So the question now is what type of affiliate marketing will work best for you? Are all affiliate marketing programs the same? Are the benefits the same? Or are there affiliate marketing programs that work better than the others?

There are actually a large variety of affiliate marketing methods, and the types will depend on how they are going to be classified. The macro level classification of affiliate marketing programs falls under three main categories: pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-play (PPP) and pay-per-performance (PPP).

TYPES OF AFFILIATE MARKETING

1. PPC – Pay-Per-Click is a highly promoted and used affiliate marketing method by affiliates with websites or small websites. This is also the easiest way for them to start making money. Under this method of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid a commission by the merchant when a visitor visits the merchant’s site through the affiliate’s reference, that is, whenever a visitor clicks and goes to the merchant’s site through the banner or text ads that the affiliate has put up.

A website owner would be given a simple code (html codes) to paste onto any webpage where the website owner wants a visitor to see the advertisements. The ads will be related to the webpage content. Pay per click is free to join but they have very strict policies especially against fraudulent clicks by owners of websites on which the advertisements are displayed.

2. PPP- Pay Per Play:  Pay per Play (PPP) is the latest wave in internet advertising. When a person visits a webpage which hosts these ads, they will hear a single 5 second professional audio advertisement. The advertisement will be relevant to the content of the webpage.

How does this work? It works much like current Pay per Click programs, minus one critical element – there will be no click required by the visitors! 100% of visitors to the webpage will generate revenue for the webpage owner. That’s the Pay Per Play Advantage! Advertisers will bid to have their ad placed on a particular website. The winner’s ad will play when a visitor opens that webpage. In turn, the website owner will get paid for every visitor to his website. The more pages the website owner has with these ads, and the more traffic he has, the more income he will generate.

3. Pay-Per-Performance (PPP) – PPP affiliate marketing is the most popular among merchant and is also the most lucrative type for the affiliates. In this type of affiliate program, the merchant only pays the affiliate whenever his referral translates into an action – that is whenever the visitor he has referred actually buys something from the merchant’s site or when the visitor becomes a lead.

A further classification of Pay-per-performance affiliate marketing can be done into two types: pay-per-sales (PPS) and pay-per-lead (PPL). Both these are very popular:

a) Pay-Per-Sale (PPS) – In a pay-per-sale type of affiliate marketing, the affiliates get the commission from the merchants whenever the visitor he has referred to the merchant’s site actually buys something from the merchant’s site.

 b) Pay-Per-Lead (PPL) – The pay-per-lead type of affiliate marketing is a slight variation of the PPS type and is often used by insurance and finance companies and other companies who rely on leads for their company to grow. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever the visitor he referred to the merchant’s site fills up an application form or any similar form related to the business of the company.

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Many people who want to earn money online think that affiliate marketing is very easy and that you can start to earn money without doing anything. Yes, it’s true that affiliate marking is one of the easiest ways to make money online. However, some effort is required before you can start to see your affiliate cheques rolling in!

New online entrepreneurs who get into affiliate marketing with some misconceptions are easily discouraged. This article outlines the realities and facts about affiliate marketing.

§    It is necessary for you to invest some money if you really want to succeed and earn big commissions. You will need to have your own website, an auto responder on your website and also track the performance of your adverts. All these items will require you to spend some money. In order to generate many sales and hence earn huge commission checks, you must drive huge volumes of traffic to your website. Depending one the advertising campaign you will want to use, you will need to pay some money for advertising.
§    You will need to apply some hard work and effort to build your affiliate marketing business. This is particularly important during the early stages of starting your business when you will need to write articles or other reports that you can use to promote your affiliate links. Blogging, participating in forums and writing affiliate product reviews are some of the things you will need to do. Depending on your budget, there are several marketing-related steps you will need to take to advertise your website. If you have money you can outsource some of the services you need. If you have a limited budget, it means you have to do most of the marketing activities yourself.
§    You will need to keep on learning. Internet marketing is very dynamic, and there are various ways of promoting your website which you can use. This means that you must keep on learning to keep yourself in line with the most effective ways for marketing online. You can interact with other affiliate marketers or you can have a very successful marketer as your mentor.
§    You need to have confidence and faith in yourself. This will help you to keep on working on your business until you become successful and earn huge commissions.

These are some of the key facts about affiliate marketing. You must fully understand this before you decide to start an affiliate marketing business.

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