Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It is an application of crowdsourcing.

The Affiliate Marketing industry has three core players at its heart: the brand/seller, the affiliate, and the customer. The market has grown sufficiently in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including Affiliate Management Agencies, Super-Affiliates and Specialized Third Parties vendors.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate Marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers.[citation needed] While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies

Every day, thousands of would-be marketers scour the internet looking for any and every affiliate program, sign up, sit back and wait for the money to pour in and get frustrated just as fast when the bank balance still shows a big, fat ZERO!

There are tons of guru's floating around and even more eBooks and articles claiming to know the latest and greatest trick to make tons of money with no effort at all (oh and of course, unless you use their method then you will never, ever get anywhere in your online business and stay broke the rest of your life). We've all seen these before.

Let's get real for a moment. If you don't put any effort into your marketing and don't spread the word of whatever you are marketing, then you will get exactly that much out of your effort. Zero effort = Zero results!

I hope that's plain enough and now let's have a look at the sensible way to market your affiliate programs, so you can actually earn some of that Internet-Money-Pie (and it's yummy too).

There are two types of affiliate programs generally. Those that pay you (1-tier) and those that pay you, plus they pay you a bonus for actions taken by visitors sent by other webmasters you have referred (2-tier).

Let's think about that for a moment. What's the easier way to make money? You sell a bunch of products and get paid on that alone, or if you sell product and also introduce the affiliate program to a bunch of webmasters who in turn also sell and they earn a nice commission and you get a bonus every single time they sell something, just for having referred them to the affiliate program?

Ok, I know you probably just smacked your forhead and said 'Duh' quite loudly and think I am stating the plain and obvious.

If you can get others to do the same thing you are doing, by keeping in touch with them and helping them and duplicating your efforts, then of course it stands to reason that the bonus you receive for referring the webmasters will generate potentially a large team of people making you money.

So, your first task is to find good, well-paying 2-tier affiliate programs. You can always use single tier programs as a back end sale or on other projects, don't get me wrong, they will still make you money, but right now, we want to get you started off on the right foot to your own internet income.

So, you've gone out and found a well-paying affiliate program, and you are ready to rumble and make money...
Not So Fast!!!

How are you going to promote it? What is your plan of attack? That's another problem many marketers run into, they just run off and don't think before they act and that again results in a lot less return for all of your efforts.

Here's what I have done in the past and always do, feel free to try this out and see the results for yourself.

After finding the affiliate program I want to promote, I check the resource material provided by the program. Sometimes, depending on how new the program is, I use their material to get things rolling but almost every time, I start to write some ads of my own, perhaps an article or even an ebook that I can use to promote the product and the affiliate program with. Some of those resources are available to readers of the eBusinessCornerNews newsletter for example.

Another thing I do, after putting together all the marketing material I want to use is to check out the competion that's already in the market. I don't really care if there is competition, as a matter of fact, many times that is a good indicator that there is a good demand for the type of product I am promoting. You can do this pretty easily by just going to a search engine and typing in keywords you associate with the product for example (there are a lot of additional ways to do this that we discuss in our newsletter).

There are a ton of places you can advertise your product, and the marketing material you are using, such as Pay Per Click, Pay Per Sale, Pay Per Lead, CPC, Article Directories, Free Advertising forums or websites, you can even find a lot of ezines that allow you to Place Free classifieds and websites you can post your ad on, at no cost.