An affiliate marketing network is made up of 3 different components.

1. The affiliate merchant is the business that offers the opportunity to make money. This includes products to sell, a website to sell them on, marketing materials, training, and all of the backend support necessary to provide products to the public. The merchant could also be known as a publisher.

2. The internet affiliate is engaged in the sale of goods and services for a commission. Affiliate marketing appeals to people who do not have products of their own to sell. It also works well for Internet marketers who want to concentrate on sales and marketing and not on website creation, creating marketing materials and so on.

3. A third component is the network itself. Think of them as a go between who brings merchants and affiliates together. Affiliate networks are very valuable to merchants who do not want to process their own payments or recruit their own affiliates. The affiliate marketing networks comes in very handy to affiliates looking for affiliates merchants in a particular area instead of them browsing the whole internet.

As a promoter of an online program,marketing networks are a great thing. It makes it very easy to monetize a website when you can go to an affiliate network to find merchants to represent.

As an illustration, ClickBank is a marketing network that puts together the services of publishers and network marketers to produce and market digital information products. With one ClickBank ID number you can have instant access to thousands of information products to sell.With the right strategies there is a lot of money to be made with this program. But,many ClickBank affiliates hardly break even owing to the high level of competition. Consequently,it makes business sense to source for alternative affiliate marketing network programs - there are many to choose from.

Commission Junction is also a leading affiliate program. With one ID number you can find merchants in multiple categories to represent and products to sell. PayDotCom is another example of a very popular affiliate marketing network.

The affiliate marketing industry is still in its infancy stages in many ways. The affiliate marketing network model will be around for a long time. As more people become accustomed to making money as affiliate marketers there will be more demand for network such as these. They will need to continue to grow and offer ways for both merchants and marketers to become more successful.