Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Affiliate Marketing Basics

By Don Bethune

Affiliate marketing programs allows advertisers to reimburse webmasters for the space of putting up advertisements on their webpage or even within the e-mails they send. These advertisers pay for space on the internet, much as they would on a billboard or in a magazine or newspaper.

The simplicity of being participating in affiliate marketing programs has made it one of the most well known ways to earn income without leaving home. These programs allows just about anyone, housewives, the elderly, the homebound, to have their own 'home business' and gain monetary freedom.

So just how do advertisers pay the webmasters hosting their ads? First, it is important to understand how sites are ranked when someone searches the web. Simply, the more hits a website receives per day the higher it is listed when a user performs a web search with a search engine. This in turn makes a frequently visited website have even more hits.

Having an add on such a page would be lucrative to any company as it can account to hundreds of new customers everyday. Therefore the price that advertisers pays to the webmasters depends on the number of hits of the webpage on which the add is going to appear on.

Advertisers using affiliate marketing programs to place ads on a website other than their own arrange payments into several different reimbursement types or payment scales. Some of the most common pay scales are referred to as per click, per thousand, per action, per lead, and many others.

In a cost per click scale the webmaster will be paid based on the number of times a person using the website hosting the ad, clicks on the link directing them to the advertiser's website. In the per thousand click scale the webmaster is paid for every thousand times a web user clicks on the ad's link. A per action scenario means that the web user must not only click through the ad link, but also complete a particular action, such as filling out customer information, signing up for a contest, completing a purchase and so on. Another payment scale type is cost per lead which is similar to cost per action, but the webmaster sends potential customer information.

How do you as a webmaster choose the right affiliate marketing program for your websites? Many webmasters simply search the internet! The best way to determine which program best suits your site is to search for affiliate programs, evaluate the payments schedules offered, and determine if ad placement is suitable for your site based on size and location requirements.

The income earned from such programs can vary depending on the number of hits your webpage receives. But is the income taxable or not? It depends on the region you are staying in and the type of government. The opportunities in this field are enormous and are worth exploiting! - 15275

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