Affliliate Marketing is the major way in which businesses both large and small market on the internet. This has become the preferred method of advertising and achieving business sales because the internet is so large - 8 billion pages and growing daily, that even huge multinationals don't have an advertising budget in which they can dominate the net. By giving others -us plebs - the chance to get in on the action companies both large and small get better return on their advertising dollar. This is because they only pay on results.

Either paying per click, lead or per sale. Thus although many affliliate programs are giving 25%-75% of the final sale as they have had to do little to generate the sale this is a price they are willing to pay as they can laugh at their own profits all the way to the bank.

Thanks to companies such as clickbank, clixgalore, commission junction, linkshare and more anyone who is on the net can start a business easily by starting their own affliliate sites.

So most people join and realise that there are literally thousands of products to advertise. How then can one decide what to advertise in order to get a return on their investment of time, effort and sometimes money (ROI - return on investment). Clickbank alone has thousands of different products to advertise. The site gives some statistics to make it a little easy like % per sale, $ earned per sale, % referred - fraction of publisher's total sales that are refferred by affliliates, and gravity - a weighted sum that lets you know the number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher's products. It can if you an idea on your own ROI.

For the newbie this information overload can present a challenge. What if you can't figure which one to promote, what if your not sure how to best match a potential customer to a potential product? what if you want to market several products at once? What if you want to market the whole lot? Surely this isn't possible with thousands of products?

The truth is you can market the whole lot and it is very easy indeed. First you need to join clickbank (see link below). Then you can advertise the whole lot by having a directory. A directory is like a big index to various products. From one index page links can be established to thousands or tens of thousands of different products, affliliate programs, etc. Your potential customer can then choose to look at topics that interest them giving more options from one webpage. Some guru's sell directories - like CBmall for $97 and such an offer is a fair ROI. But if you hunt around you can find a similiar product for FREE.

If you visit http://total-shopping.blogspot.com you will see an example of such a directory (if you want one yourself don't forget to join clickbank first). Clicking on vary topics will take to you to thousands of affliliates products. Many are very useful for the newbie internet marketer - traffic builders, article submitter and many more; and some are intended for the general web market - e.g. dealing with divorce, how to beat a speeding ticket and many more.

Now from one source you have established links to thousands of affliliate programs. It is easy then to advertise the one site and let the customer choose the product they are interested in. You will have begun the quickest and easiest way into affliliate marketing.