Content Marketing

One of the quickest and easiest methods of getting product on your website is to partner with an existing company and advertise their merchandise. While the results of this type of internet marketing varies greatly from one individual to another, it has consistently proven to be a good opportunity for both webmaster and the parent company to find willing customers for their merchandise..

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is the process by which a company will provide advertising material in the form of text or personally identifiable HTML code to place on your web pages. This code will create banners or text blocks providing information about the products. In turn, when a customer clicks through the ad to the parent website and makes a purchase, the owner of the originating website will be paid a percentage of the sale as commission.

The business of affiliate marketing has become so popular that a number of companies have formed to be a clearinghouse for retailers to use rather than each having to run the necessary tracking software to keep all the records straight. Companies like "Link Share" and "Commission Junction" provide the retailers with all the tools needed to find affiliates, provide the codes and tools for marketing and the ability to track the individual identifiers for each affiliate's account. Once a website owner has created an account with one of these affiliate clearinghouses, they are provided with a long list of companies they can contract with to find niche specific products to match the topic of their site.

Payment on commissions is not done on a sale by sale basis. Each affiliate company will have a set minimum payout that must be reached either monthly or quarterly. If there have not been enough sales for that pay period, it will roll over to the next. This method is still better for the website owner as the sales commissions from all the companies he affiliates with will be placed into one payment rather than having to reach payout with every individual company he has advertising for on his site.

While this method of generating income from your website is fairly easy to run, there are a few downside features. When a person visits a retailer from your site, there is placed a "cookie" on their machine that includes your personal identifying number. If they make the purchase right then you will get the credit. However, while some companies will create cookies that stay active for as much as a year, others will expire when the webpage or web browser is closed. This means that if a potential customer bookmarks the page to come back and make the purchase at a later date, the cookie information may have expired or been deleted and you will not get credit for that sale.

The best way to insure that you will make a respectable income with affiliate marketing is to create an interesting and informative site in your specific topic and fine tune your advertised products to match that interest.

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