Affiliate programs made easy

The Internet is the world's greatest market place. Hundreds of thousands of companies are selling their products and services online with each desperately trying to stand out from the masses. With millions of web pages on the Internet today it has become increasingly hard to be noticed amongst those masses. In order to sell any product a company will usually employ several marketing systems. One of these marketing systems is the affiliate program.We've all come to know and love (or hate) them. Colorful banners, annoying pop-ups, pop-ins, pop-unders, unwanted email (Spam) and even messages on our instant messenger service (Spim) are all used to attract the attention of the crowd to a particular product or service. A lot of these advertisements will create an excess of 'useless' traffic (i.e. people that just go to the advertised site to see what all the hustle and bustle is about). As a result this method of advertising is often considered unreliable and inefficient and has to be used in large quantities to be successful. Enter the affiliate program.Affiliate programs are essentially used to have someone other then the product owner promote and sell the product. This is done on the basis of commissions offered to website owners who are willing to advertise the product on their website. The affiliate program owner offers a fee to the affiliate whenever someone buys from the affiliate program owner's website via a link placed on the website of the affiliate. This leaves advertising for the product almost completely up to the affiliate who only receives a fee if a product is actually sold.Affiliate programs can generate large networks of affiliated sites that can drastically increase the sales of a particular service or product. Affiliate program referral fees can be anything from a few cents per click to hundreds of dollars for a registration or a product sale.Affiliate programs have the nice addition that they are incredibly easy to set up often only needing a few minutes per month of maintenance for potentially high returns. As an affiliate all we have to do is place the link of the affiliate program on our website or find some other means to link to the affiliate owner's website and money will start coming in all on its own.As opposed to endless banners, popups, pop-unders, pop-ins and Spam mail affiliate programs often manage to be a more direct method of advertising. Only interested parties will generally click on affiliate links converting many of the casual surfers to actually interested buyers. Today the affiliate program is one of the most popular tools for Internet marketing purposes.