What is an Affiliate Program?

An affiliate program is a scheme which supports the marketing of a service or product where the marketing operates as revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a hybrid model.

What is meant by multi-tier?

Many affiliate programs allow you to benefit by signing up people to join the same affiliate program under you, forming one tier. You will be paid a percentage of the commissions earned by those people in your down-line.
A multi-tier affiliate program is where the benefits extend to you earning from referrals made by people who have joined the program under those people on your first tier or any lower tier. The program may impose a limit on the number of tiers from which you earn commissions.

What are the advantages of Affiliate Programs?

They relieve you of some of the pressure, when compared to reseller programs. You can let other companies hold inventory, take orders and provide customer care.

What are the disadvantages of Affiliate Programs?

You are only going to get paid a percentage commission for your sales, but that is not so much of a disadvantage when you consider that the owner company takes care of most of the running costs (you just need to run your website). It will be up to you to promote your website and do much of the marketing. Having said that, the owner company will help you by giving you marketing tips, banners you can include on your site and wording for your e-mail signatures and text links.

How do I get started?

The organisations running the affiliate programs are only to happy to give you all the advice you need to get started. Take, for example, Refer Central . Their site makes it easy for you to join their successful down-line club and is packed with advice on how to promote the URLs they set up for you. They include some promotional tools and an on-line training center to help you further. The same goes for Paidmania, our favourite paid-to-click program, affiliate program, paid-to-have-a-start-page rotator & getpaid downline program (yes, they are ALL these!).

What kind of affiliate programs are available?

You'll find affiliate programs connected to every conceivable kind of product and service that it is possible to sell via the Internet. T-shirts, webmaster's resources, web hosting, electrical equipment, on-line shopping malls, software, games, ringtones, mobiles, furniture, gambling, holidays, travel and books are all popular.

Are affiliate programs known by any other name?

Referral programs and associate programs are basically the same thing. Affiliate programs are, however, not the same as reseller programs even though the terms affiliate and reseller are often used (mistakenly) interchangeably. The difference is explained here. A partner is a general term e.g. you can be an affiliate partner or a reseller partner.

How do I make a success from affiliate programs?

1) You must know your audience, 2) Believe in your products and 3) Promote your site.
It is best not to attempt to promote products which are unrelated to your site. For example, promoting fishing tackle on a web developer's website may not work too well! Some combinations of seemingly unrelated products and services do work, however. You need to experiment and use a bit of lateral thinking. Perhaps people looking for products for babies will also be interested in earning money working from home, so they can mix work and raising a family. To put across to your audience that you believe in your products, you need to include personal recommendations and endorsements. Avoid over hype, though. Finally, promote your website. See our guide or check out a web promotion company called Alcander, who we recommend. Alcander have a lot of free do-it-yourself web promotion tips as well as running a web promotion consultancy.

We also have found that TrafficSwarm is extremely effective at promoting any URL. TrafficSwarm is a fully-automated traffic-generation system that can send 1000s of targeted prospects to your site, every single day, absolutely FREE! It's completely automated and it takes about five minutes to set up. Further more it's targeted (you'll get only real traffic, appropriate for your site) and viral (your traffic will increase exponentially).

What is the difference between Reseller Programs and Affiliate Programs

Resellers are different to Affiliate Programs in that the reseller buys from a merchant and his or her (i.e. the reseller's) customers buy directly from the reseller.