Attention! This Book Will Make You Money: How to Use Attention-Getting Online Marketing to Increase Your Revenue

Chapter 38. Affiliate Marketing

How would you like to make money by telling other people about products and services that you love? You have no inventory to maintain or no employees to pay or schedules to work out, none of that stuff. You simply use a tracking code to direct people to places online where they can buy things, and when they do, you earn a percentage of that sale. That's essentially what affiliate marketing is along with a few of the reasons why it's become so popular.

An easier way to explain it is to imagine a door-to-door salesperson. Before the Web, and still today in some cases, sales-people would work on commission-only deals with the merchants whose products they sold. A good example is the Encyclopedia Britannica salesperson who showed up at your front door step years and years ago trying to get you to buy a set of encyclopedias. If you bought a set of the encyclopedias, the salesperson would make some money. If you didn't buy the books, the salesperson made nada, and onto the next house they went. Ding-dong!

Affiliate marketing is just like that, except in today's Internet-enabled world, it all takes place online and uses modern tracking to ensure that the affiliate gets paid. Instead of going door-to-door, a Web reader clicks on a link or banner provided to them by you, the affiliate. When that click happens, the special code behind the scenes tracks the clicker over to the merchant's web site, and if they end up buying something, you, the affiliate, are paid ...