I have no idea what affiliates are? Is a link exchange, how does it work, do I pay each time someone visits my site? Please can someone explain
affiliates meaning you are trying to help someone to sell their product. i.e. you put their site url with your ID attach to it, when someone click on that link, you may get some comission based on the condition of the affiliate.
That is right. You are selling a product for someone and receiving a commission everytime you make a sale of that product. A good affiliate program will offer tons of support for their affiliates to help them sale their product. The two I promote in my sig are two of the best I have seen when it comes to offering great support to anyone in their program!
The service I use is pretty good with the support side as well. This affiliate program thing is the best thing that has happened to my site. I don't think I will ever get over the fact that there are still sites with high SERPs in competitive keywords that have zero ways to monetize on all that traffic. It's great to get tons of traffic to your site, but it's 100 times better when you are getting paid for it.
The term "affiliates" is in reference to your affiliation with a company. Essentially, you've elected (or opt-in) yourself to become a lead provider. By using various forms of internet marketing to drive traffic (SEO, etc) you're efforts are compensated in different forms like pay per lead or pay per action.
thankyou everyone for this. sem-antics I loved your description you sound like my webmaster teacher! So what are the best affiliate programmes or site, I want something where users will follow through a buy so I can get more chance of being paid
Thanks trickfly. The "best affiliate program" really depends on you. You'll be spending a lot of time to make it a success, so it can help if it's a subject that interests you. Partially because one strategy that some people sue, and that's becoming a resource (semi-expert) on a subject. Also, the "best affiliate program" is depending on what you target. I think you'll find this post of interest if you are just starting... http://www.affearners.com/forum/newbie-corner/affiliate-marketing-101-t13.0.html;msg168#msg168
Trickfly, I'm a newbie to marketing too, but check this out. It's called Wealthy Affiliate 2.0. It's saved me a whole lot of time and money. As a learning resource it has been the best thing to happen to me in affiliate marketing. But it's so much more. If you want to find out what affiliate marketing can do for you AND you want to find out how to go about doing it -the right way, you'll really like this. http://wealthypages.georgelujan.com (sorry. live links aren't allowed for newbies like me, so you'll have to cut-n-paste) It's like an Internet Marketing University - and not just the Affiliate Marketing 101 stuff. It's a learning center, a training resource, a supportive community, and an industry-specific tools repository. So it goes real deep into graduate level stuff too. Should you desire this kind of work, I think you'll like Wealthy Affiliate. Here's the link to my "landing page". It'll tell you all about it; compare it to others; and then give you the opportunity to sign up. http://wealthypages.georgelujan.com