Get to know what Affiliate Marketing is all about

Online Affiliate Marketing is a revenue sharing marketing endeavor between a website owner and an online merchant. As per this model, the website owner will place advertisements on his websites to promote the merchant's products or to drive potential customers to the merchant's website, all in exchange for a share of the profits.

An affiliate marketing program is also called an affiliate program. Sometimes it is referred to as a pay-for-performance program or an associate program. This is an effective marketing tool for the online business that operates it, called merchant or advertiser and a source of revenue for the e-business that participates in it, called an affiliate or associate or publisher.

Some of the ways to earn revenue through affiliate marketing are:

• Pay per Click or Cost-per-click affiliate programs: Whenever a potential customer is diverted from the affiliate website by "clicking" on the link leading to the merchant's website, certain amount is deposited in the affiliate's account.
• Pay per Lead or Cost-per-lead affiliate programs: In this particular affiliate marketing program, the merchant pays the affiliate a set fee for each visitor who clicks through and takes and action at the merchant's site, such as completing an online survey, or registering at the site.
• Pay per Sale or Cost-per-sale affiliate programs: As per this model, every time a sale is made as a result of advertising on the affiliate's website, a certain percentage, or commission, is deposited into the affiliate's account.
• Affiliate marketing is an art that requires smart and tactical strategies. Writing a great product review or promoting a great product will not be effective to make any sales from your affiliate links. It s not a great product review, rather a perfect Affiliate Marketing Strategy is required to generate sales from your links.

Given below is an Affiliate Marketing Strategy Model:

• Firstly, choose the product that you intend to promote and then write down a great, unique, and informative product review.
• The second step would be to become an Affiliate of ClickBank, Amazon, or Commission Junction. You can generate an affiliate link for your product and put it on your review page and publish it on your website or a blog. The key idea is to publish your web page containing your affiliate link anywhere on the web and divert the web traffic towards it.
• Link Building: This is a significant step. To drive web traffic towards a website, it is important to create and publish the content on other popular websites on the Internet and then put a link of your affiliate page.
• Try different social networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon & Reditt to divert more web traffic towards your affiliate links.
• Now wait for web traffic to accelerate. As traffic gets diverted to your website, you will surely earn profits.

The more traffic you divert towards your affiliate links, greater would be the sales generated and the more money you will make. Once you generate an affiliate link on your website, you can drive more traffic towards those affiliate links via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Articles Directories.

If you are an owner of a successful blog or a website, it will be easy for you to make money from affiliate marketing because you can control your existing customer base. So you can follow some of these smart strategies and tips on affiliate marketing.