Netalot

Internet marketers looking to generate income with an online business might want to consider signing up to an affiliate program. This appears to be one of the biggest growth areas in online business right now.

First of all let’s have a look at what the term actually means. Simply stated it’s a program where you earn commission by introducing visitors or buyers to another website.

There is a trend towards calling this form of marketing performance marketing. In other words if a visitor who you sent to the site buys a product, you get paid for that performance.

But there are also other forms of this affiliate marketing where a visitor does not have to buy anything for you to earn a commission. A visitor to the site may just need to sign up to a newsletter or sign up to a site such as a dating site.

A visitor may also just click on an ad and you can earn some commission on that. The most commonly known of this is Google’s Adsense. Most bloggers have taken part in this program. A few years ago when the web was not quite that populated with bloggers, these click through ads paid out fairly handsomely.

Nowadays this is no longer the case and you would need a blog with huge amounts of monthly traffic to earn a living with Adsense advertising on your blog. These ads are generally text ads but there are increasing numbers of graphic ads being offered as well.

Regardless of the effectiveness of click through advertising commission most bloggers do have some text link ads on their blogs. It is one of the easiest to set up and this is something technically challenged bloggers can do themselves.

The bulk of the revenue made in the affiliate marketing space is commission based. About eighty percent of earnings are made via the revenue sharing form of business. As a prime example one needs go no further than Amazon.

In fact Amazon has been credited with being the first serious online shop offering affiliate marketing opportunities. Although other smaller traders worked on this before Amazon, it is this huge online retailer who really got it going and in fact has patents on many of the processes involved.

Amazon does make it fairly easy for somebody to sign up as an affiliate. The process is straight forward and the advertising material that you may use on your blog is good. The only real problem is that Amazon pays a very small percentage on a sale. In other words the commission is low.

Amazon is therefore very much like Google Adsense where you can only make some money if your blog or site has high amounts of traffic, for high traffic read hundreds of thousands of visitors.

For the average blogger this kind of traffic is not a reality and neither Google nor Amazon’s affiliate programs are of much use to them when looking to make a living. It is for this reason that only about one percent of affiliate revenue is made through click through commission payments.

The third affiliate program type is a cost per action program. Nineteen percent of affiliate revenue is earned through this form of commission payment. A cost per action program would be one where the affiliate gets paid for inducing a visitor to sign up for an opt in e-mail list for instance.

These are the three predominant affiliate programs currently on offer for Internet marketers. Deciding which one would suit you the best would depend on your interests and what kind of serious traffic your blog attracts.