What is affiliate marketing and how does it work? And is it the right online business model for you? These are two questions that I will answer in today’s article.

There are many different ways to make money online and one of them is affiliate marketing. This model has been around for years and basically there are two side to the affiliate coin. One is the affiliate(you), who markets the product or service and second is the merchant or who provides the product or service for you to market.

When marketing as an affiliate you receive commissions when a transaction takes place. The amount of commission can vary depending on the merchant and kind of product or service.

One of the ways of utilizing affiliate products is through building a list of your own and then marketing to your list of subscribers. The biggest benefit here is that instead of you sending the searcher to the merchant’s site directly, they opt-in and subscribe to your site first. This way you maintain the relationship with the subscriber

As an affiliate the merchant will provide you advertising and promotional materials like banner and text link ads that can be used to promote the products or services. You can then use these ads on your websites, in signatures and on other people’s websites to generate traffic to the offer or your subscriber lead capture page.

So how do you the online marketer promote affiliate products and services so you can make commissions on the sales that occur?

1. Find affiliate products and services that are directly related to your niche or business and promote them on your niche based website. You will need to find an affiliate network so be prepared to research and have your sites ready so you can be approved.

2. Promote the affiliate products through content that you write and post on different websites and blogs.

3. Promote the mix of products and services to your list of subscribers in an automated email campaign. This way you can control what is sent to the subscriber and when it is sent.

Hopefully you can see that affiliate marketing can be a workable web-based business model and in some cases be just the right fit for list building online.

For more information on how you can build a list of subscribers – check out The List Building Guide for tips, tactics and strategies.

Dave Krygier
Publisher