There is a fair degree of overlap between affiliate marketing and other Internet marketing methods like SEO, SEM (discussed in Part2) and email campaigns, the difference being affiliates sometimes use techniques like publishing reviews of product and services offered by the business.

Affiliate marketing for most businesses carry a low profile but shouldn't be overlooked while spending the time and money on SEO and SEM. The online adult industry is said to be the early innovators of affiliate marketing before CDNow in November 1994 launched their BuyWeb program and Amazon associate program in July 1996, in both cases a commission was paid to affiliate for the click-through-purchase.

This technique has grown on since then with the rise of blogging, socially active online communities and other new business models, web sites and services based on the Web 2.0 concepts have impacted the affiliate marketing in a huge way. Please remember that every individual and your past customers who have any kind of web presence have the potential to become your affiliate.

Starting Affiliate Marketing

It was probably easy for businesses like CDNow and Amazon to easily get up and running on their affiliate marketing but often difficult for small and medium business to get going.

You could run your own affiliate program in-house or use third party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic and sales that are referred from affiliates. The "outsource program managers" or "affiliate managers" can help your business attract more traffic and increase revenue by managing your affiliate program in more than one ways. Following are some of the tasks that an affiliate manager would help the business with:

* Creating the affiliate program
* Communicating with the affiliates
* Training affiliates for your product and services and marketing
*Recruiting more affiliates
* Tracking the efficacy of the program
* Promoting other products and services to affiliates

The affiliate managers can be thought of as a synonym for your PR/Ad agencies in the online world that promote a brand or product.

Types of Affiliates Websites

Following are some of the typical affiliate websites you should look at while doing affiliate marketing. There could also be some other affiliates you could opt for that are not in this list; but then it's just a matter of context and relevance.

* Blog community sites, blogs, blog rolls, and RSS feeds
* Product and services review sites
*Email list affiliates
*Online directories and yellow pages
*Rebate sites that focus on sales promotion
*Search sites
*Online communities, mostly specific and with the context. For example, if you manufacture electronic good a community that's built around sharing information on these types of goods.

Affiliate networks generally have a large number of affiliate publishers that can be potentially recruited. Sometimes the affiliate publishers apply to the program by default without any effort to recruit them.

Affiliate program directories is another way to look for affiliate programs. Other options are to look for affiliate programs with different websites that you think are in context; generally websites that offer affiliate program have links to the same or give contact information.

You should make an effort to validate the claims of an affiliate network, as some affiliates have known to use spam, false advertisement, forced clicks, adware, and other unscrupulous methods to drive traffic to their sponsors. Don't enroll an affiliate or a network which doesn't have "Terms and Service Agreements" against use of above mentioned methods.

Again as I earlier mentioned, it's the quality of your product and services that will matter at the end of the day and win you happy customers. SEO, SEM, and various marketing tools and strategies will only get you first time customers, but it's you, your product and services that you offer will help in repeat and "Word of Mouth (WOM)" business that can easily outclass and outstrip any other methods.

Related Links:
How to Take Your Biz Online and Beyond: Part 1
How to Take Your Biz Online and Beyond: Part 2