Affiliate marketing is when a person or company’s products are sold by affiliates, who then receive commissions. It’s somewhat similar to door to door selling, except the customers come to you!

An affiliate sells someone else’s product (or, sometimes, captures lead for someone else) and receives a commission. Usually, the affiliate has a web site or blog, but sometimes may have a single page devoted to that affiliate program.

Affiliate marketing follows several different models. Some affiliate marketers use advertising to drive people to their sites. Usually this is pay per click, or PPC advertising. (Next time you use Google’s search engine, look on the right of the results page. Those ads are pay per click ads. The advertisers don’t pay for them to be shown; they pay a fee every time the links are clicked, however).

But affiliate marketers also advertise in ezines, on websites, and even in local newspapers and other print publications, depending on what the product is (and what the local area is like).

Some affiliate marketers advertise very little, or else not at all! This is called the “Bum” method. These marketers do their utmost to optimize their sites for search engines, so that they naturally get good rankings. But they use other methods too. Primarily, they write article and submit them to article directories. At the end of every article is a bio box, with a link back to the affiliate web site.
Articles are the chief “advertising” method of bum marketing, but it’s not the only way to get traffic. Bum marketers also make use of forums, blogs (their own, as well as commenting on other blogs to get attention, traffic, and occasionally search-optimizing backlinks), Squidoo pages, Hub pages, and a whole host of other methods to get free traffic. The article is at the center of this model, but there are very few bum marketers who use articles and articles alone to drive traffic to their sites.

What do you have to do to sign up to be an affiliate? That depends on who you’re signing up with. Usually you will need a web site, or at least a single page. Depending on what you’re selling, and who you’re selling for, your site or page might need to be focused on the niche that your affiliate product is in. (It won’t necessarily have to, but honestly it’s best for your own sales, if it does).

Now you know all you need to sign up as an affiliate marketer. In my next article, I’ll tell you some things you need to know once you’re there.