Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

If you are looking for a fun, easy, fast and inexpensive way to make money on the internet, the you should look into some of the affiliate marketing network opportunities that are available. These networks let you represent many different companies and their product lines and earn commission on sale you refer.

There are thousands upon thousands of affiliate programs available, and many of them are for an independent internet store, or for a single product. If you are a very active affiliate marketer, you could end up having hundreds of different affiliate accounts that you have to manage. The emails alone from that many affiliate accounts can be daunting. The advantage of working through an affiliate network is that you can represent many different merchants, and thousands of products, with just one affiliate account.

The affiliate marketing network serves as the go-between that sets up the affiliate agreements that the merchant site abide by as well as the affiliates. This arrangement attracts merchants who are looking for an instant pool of affiliates to market their latest product or promotion, and it attracts many affiliates who benefit from being able to offer a wide variety of products.

One of the other advantages to affiliates of participating in this type of marketing affiliate program is that the tracking is much easier on the affiliate. By logging into your affiliate network account, you can easily see all of the activity in your account, and most programs allow you to export your tracking information so that you can do data analysis in a spreadsheet program like Excel.

Many people don't think carefully about the step of getting paid, even though it is the reason for being an active affiliate marketer. Virtually all affiliate programs, whether it is a program for an individual company or a large group, have a minimum amount you must earn in affiliate commissions before they will pay you. If you have 100 separate affiliate programs, all with different minimums, you could have hundreds or even thousands of dollars in commissions locked up because you don't meet the minimum for all or most of these programs. If you are doing most of your affiliate promotions through centralized affiliate network, it will take much less effort to start receiving your affiliate commissions because they will add up to the minimum much more quickly.

The requirements for getting started as an affiliate are usually pretty simple. Some networks require you to have your own website, but some are satisfied if you have a blog or an email newsletter that you will use to promote their links. Of course, you need reliable email that you have some control over as far as filtering, so that you do receive important affiliate communications.

Some of the biggest affiliate networks are: Commission Junction, ClickBank, LinkShare, Direct Leads, and WebSponsors. Many people start with ClickBank because the percent of commissions is high compared to the others. However, some people prefer Commission Junction because their network includes many well-known sites, and some people feel that having banners from these well-know sites lend credibility to their own website.

If you are new to the area of work from home internet business, then another advantage of starting with an affiliate marketing network is that many of them also offer valuable training material to help you learn how to become a successful affiliate marketer.