How do you make money from Affiliate Marketing?

There are 3 ways to make money from Affiliate Marketing:

1. Pay Per Click — Every time a potential customer leaves the affiliate website by “clicking” on the link leading to the merchant’s website, a certain amount of money is deposited in the affiliate’s account. This amount can be pennies or dollars depending on the product and amount of the commission.

2. Pay Per Sale — Every time a sale is made as a result of advertising on the affiliate’s website, a percentage, or commission, is deposited into the affiliate’s account.

3. Pay Per Lead — Every time a potential client registers at the merchant’s website as a result of the advertisement on the affiliate’s account, a previously determined amount is deposited into the affiliate’s account.

History of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing has only come to promenance since 1994 with the birth of successful ecommerce portals such as CDNOW and Amazon.com. CDNOW launched it’s affiliate program in 1994 called BuyWeb and Amazon launched its affiliate program in 1996. Amazon associates placed a banner or text ad on their website and if a visitor clicked on these links they would be taken to Amazons website. If they proceded to purchase an item from Amazon, the associate received a commission.

The Future of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is experiencing rapid growth. According to a report by MarketingSherpa’s in 2006, affiliates worldwide earned US$6.5 billion in bounty and commissions from a variety of sources in retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, and forms of lead generation other than contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense.

The increase in online transactions and the low barrier of entry to ecommerce is fueling this growth. The main market for Affiliate Marketing is in the United States who were the earlier adopters of this form of marketing but the U.K. is starting to embrace it at a rapid pace too. In Ireland it is still a very small industry with only a handfull of companies running affiliate programs.

I feel that this is definitely going to be a growth industry in Ireland over the next few years much like the rise in the Search Engine Optimisation Industry in Ireland. For anybody reading this I’d love to hear your views on the future of affiliate marketing in Ireland and the U.K., please comment below!