Forum Moderators: mack
here's the skinny.
Big Websites (and some small) have affiliate programs so affiliates can promote their products for a small(sometimes not so small if your lucky) cut.
When you sign up to an affiliate program, you are generally supplied with linking codes(in order to track sales back to you). Sometimes you will be supplied with banners, and even content to build a site with.
From my experience, the ones who do best at affiliate marketing are webmasters with large sites with targeted traffic(and lots of it).
For example You have a large information site on widgets.
you dont want to deal with the hassles of selling widgets.
you find an affiliate who sells red widgets and one that sells blue widgets. put banners on your sites in the appropriate sections with affiliate codes attached, and now you can convert your traffic into sales.
To my way of thinking it is a bad idea to go for the most popular industries, for example music, travel and adult. Find an industry that is not entirely mainstream, but would be popular enough to make it worth while. Do not simply roll out pages with nothing more that affiliate links on them, this will not work long term.
Start by building on topic content pages. Go into great detail and give loads of great information on the subject. Then try and get traffic.
As traffic increaases you can then start to add on topic link to affiliate sites. To grow traffic you need to have good content. On the web nothing will give you a better chance of sucess than good origional high quality content, and lots of it.
Because of your good content people will be willing to link to you. As people link to you your search engine positioning will improve. When this happens traffic will follow.
It is not a quick process though. It can and usualy does take months to even appear in the search engines. Be prepared to wait it out long term before you can realisticaly try to cash in.
Mack.
