Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Affiliate Marketing Basics

By Don Bethune

Affiliate marketing programs allows advertisers to reimburse webmasters for the space of putting up advertisements on their webpage or even within the e-mails they send. These advertisers pay for space on the internet, much as they would on a billboard or in a magazine or newspaper.

The simplicity of being participating in affiliate marketing programs has made it one of the most well known ways to earn income without leaving home. These programs allows just about anyone, housewives, the elderly, the homebound, to have their own 'home business' and gain monetary freedom.

So how and why do advertisers pay the webmasters hosting their ads? First, it is important to understand how sites are ranked when someone searches the web. When a web user searches for a particular site or term, the listing the search engine provides is from website rankings. These rankings are produced when someone visits or browses a website. The higher a website is listed in the search results, the more hits per day it receives, thus improving its ranking furher.

The more traffic the site sees, the more likely a user is to click through the ad link on a website. Paying for ad space on these popular sites can potentially result in hundreds of new customers each day. Advertising space is therefore priced based on the hits that the website receives.

Advertisers using affiliate marketing programs to place ads on a website other than their own arrange payments into several different reimbursement types or payment scales. Some of the most common pay scales are referred to as per click, per thousand, per action, per lead, and many others.

Similar analogies stand for the others. For example cost per thousand means getting paid for a thousand clicks of the advertisers adds and cost per action means getting paid everytime a certain action is performed. Cost per lead is similar to cost per action.

Well a question now arises is how to choose the right affiliate marketing program for your webpage? The answer is quite simple. Search the internet to find the best program to suit your webpage as the internet is loaded with hundreds of such programs and is sure to provide you with the most suitable option for your webpage.

Income from affiliate marketing is highly dependent on the number of hits a website receives. It is important to consider that part or all of the income generated may be considered taxable income; it is best to check with your local tax office for city, state, and federal regulations. Regardless, the income potential is boundless and worth looking into. - 16651

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