To most Internet users, the word affiliate probably does not mean too terribly much. But whether you know it or not, you’ve been exposed to a lot of affiliate marketing if you spend any time surfing around various web sites.
Like most things in life, there are good things and bad things about affiliate marketing. Some of the good things are the informative and helpful sites that are built by honest, hard-working affiliates that make a lot of useful information available to online consumers.
The bad things are, as you might expect, the unscrupulous affiliates who will do or say almost anything in order to complete a sale. A lot of the SPAM you receive hyping various products from Viagra to cheap software, is sent by affiliates. Most affiliate programs forbid the use of SPAM, however, there are those that will allow just about any method that might result in a sale.
What is an affiliate program? Basically, it is a program that is set up by someone who wants to sell something, and use other people (affiliates) to help market the product. Some of the most well-known affiliate programs were started by companies like Amazon.com and eBay.
The most basic form of affiliate marketing involves web site owners who put advertising banners on their sites. For example, if I were involved with the Amazon.com affiliate program, you might see some advertising on my site for some real estate or consumer oriented books that are for sale at Amazon.com.
If you were interested in one of these ads and clicked on it, you would arrive at the Amazon.com web site with a special code embedded in the link that was used to bring you to the store, and identify my web site as the one that hosted the ad you clicked on.
If you decided to purchase one of the books, I would get a percentage of the profits that Amazon.com has earned from that sale. It’s an ingenious way for companies to use the vast expanse of the Internet and creativity of web site owners to market their products.
Some affiliate programs also make use of ‘cookies,’ which are small snippets of code stored on your computer that tells a particular web site that you have learned about their site from a advertisement on an affiliate marketer’s site. That way, the affiliate marketer gets credit for the sale if you decide to make a purchase.
Some Internet users are a bit paranoid about cookies, and although there is cause for some concern, the majority of cookies used on web sites are harmless, and are used for things like saving your login settings for web sites that require it, and for tracking affiliate links.
Cookies can, and surely are, abused by some web site operators and are used to track what other sites people are visiting and other questionable purposes. These are most likely in use by sites that try to infect your computer with adware or spyware.
I should also mention that anyone who is buying products through an affiliate link is not charged any more than any other customer. There is no additional cost involved to pay the affiliate marketer. The affiliate marketer just gets a percentage of the usual price if the customer arrives at a site by following a link on an affiliate marketer’s site.
In case you were wondering, yes, I do a little affiliate marketing myself. There are sections of this site that are primarily for affiliate marketing purposes. However, in both cases, the products I am marketing are products that I own and use myself, and have a very high opinion of.
I would not advertise products I do not believe in on my site. Sure, I could join up with a hundred different affiliate programs (it is not difficult to do) and plaster colorful, flashing banners all over this site, but I feel a lot better about advertising a product that I use and feel good about.
In case you were wondering, one the affiliate marketing programs I am involved with is for DISH Network.
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