Making Money with Affiliate Programs

You become a sales rep for another site, often called a merchant, by becoming an affiliate (also sometimes called an associate) of the merchant.

With affiliate programs , your site provides links to a merchant's site. You make money ifand only ifvisitors you send to the merchant's site make purchases. If this sounds easy, it can be. You don't need to stock inventory, or worry about fulfillment, shipping, and returns. And you still make moneysometimes very good moneywhen the product sells.

However, selling on the Internet is very competitive; there are always multiple avenues for a consumer to buy anything. Furthermore, there's nothing to stop consumers from bypassing your site completely and going directly to the merchant. You'll only be successful with your affiliate links if the goods provided by the merchants you are associated with are highly relevant to the content of your site.

This chapter explains the different kinds of ad programs, how affiliate advertising works, how to work with affiliate aggregatorseverything you need to know to make money with affiliate programs, provided your sites draw traffic that will click on links to your affiliated merchants and that these merchants can convert your traffic so that sales are made.