AFFILIATE MARKETING So What is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing is nothing more than marketing products that belong to someone else. In the offline world, it would be similar to being a manufacturer's rep. An affiliate product or service  is offered by a company or a person who wants to extend his marketing efforts beyond the scope of his hands on control. Affiliate marketing gives a company the ability to have 100's or 1,000's of sales people marketing their products on a commission basis. It is the essense of free enterprise. Affiliate marketing is a business model that operates on a pay-for-performance basis. Business owners who intiates an affiliate and actively recruits affilates to join their sales effort normally provide the participants a good assortment of marketing tools to use, in order to further the cause.  Tools such as links, banners, buttons, or code to be placed on a vendors website or placed in an e-mail to the affiliates list. The affiliate is assigned a URL that uniquely defines each and every affiliate. When a client visits the vendors website as a result of the affiliate's link, banner, or code. That client becomes linked as the affiliate customer for some period of time usually 1-3 years depending on the terms of the program.  No matter when that client makes a purchase from the vendor's website, whether it be today, or months from now, the affiliate gets credited for the sale. The amount of the commission varies depending on the affiliate program. Sometimes it is a flat rate, and sometimes it is a percentage. If the product is an informational product,  the normal commission percentage to expect will be between 50% and 100%. If the product is a hard good that needs to be manufactured and deliverd by standard delivery methods, you can expect commisions in the 5-25% range. It is no wonder why informational products are a gold mine to the affiliate marketer where 90% of the  commissions offered are 50% and greater. Other types of affiliate compensation include pay-per- lead or pay-per-click. There are huge advertising networks that specialize in providing quality affiliate programs of this nature. The vendor that offers an affiliate program is an individual, or a company, that wants to expand their sales force without employee overhead.  Affiliate marketing is a relatively low-risk form of advertising. The vendor having developed a product or a service has minimal cost in extending their sales force. They can have 100's or 1,000's of salespeople marketing their products with little associated cost. They only pay if the affiliate sends a client who buys.  Most companies would much rather pay affiliate commissions than spend money on expensive hit-or-miss advertising that may never make a sale. This holds true even if they are paying high commissions, since they only pay when an actual sale happens. Vendors who operate affiliate programs, use affiliate software to track affiliate links and commissions, issue payments via check, paypal,  or bank transfer. This affiliate tracking software can be installed on the vendors server, or the software can be leased on a monthly basis from numerous affiliate tracking providers. The affiliate tracking software whether operating on your server or being maintained by a 3rd party vendor,  perform services such as storing your affiliate contact information, issuing affiliate identifications (affiliate IDs), sending you affiliate link code and affiliate links, calculating and storing commission information, and paying the affiliates.