If you plan to build an internet business or internet empire without a doubt affiliate marketing is something you need to become involved with.

So let's answer the first question, What is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate Marketing is selling on behalf of someone else in return for a percentage of the sale. You stock no product, don't need to package or handle, nor do you have the normal business overheads. What you do need with Affiliate Marketing is web presence. The internet is now so huge - 8 Billion pages and growing - that the chance of someone stumbling on your site is low to nil without doing some tricks of the trade. (see my article or website on generate traffic and create hits) for further on that topic.

The simple fact of the matter is you will not get sales if you don't get traffic. Think of it this way - an affiliate product is sold by advertising, therefore what will generate more sales? One ad or thousands of ads? That's pretty easy, the more ads, the more traffic, the greater the number of sales. Understand that the conversion rate on the internet is low. A conversion rate is the number of views before a potential sale. Normally this hovers around 1%. It tends not to matter what you are selling this rate tends to remain the same, your offer could be the very best on the net but still the conversion rate tends to be 1% - or one in hundred visitors will buy and make you money. Anyone with a conversion rate of 3% would be considered to be doing amazingly well and most people can not achieve this kind of result. Compare this with the conversion rate of people visiting the local shopping center, apart those teenagers who just love to 'hang', most people going to the shops buy at least something.

Obviously the internet is a different kind of market. People are in the comfort of their own homes. The psychology of the sale is very different. Whereas people going to the shops are buying necessities like the weekly groceries, online people are tending to buy luxuries. The spur of the moment sale is less demanding as well, because people can bookmark and know they can come back later - they can delay the purchase decision with no fear of losing their chance to purchase. Some internet marketers have tried to overcome this by saying only 50 left, only 33 left, etc, having a count down. But as they tend to be selling information packages and not hard products people still to not have the need to impulse buy. Whereas at the shop they are aware the stock is limited and may be sold out next week so the buy now mentality rules, hence why we continue to have increasing credit card debt.

However just because the impulse buy is not the overriding feature on the internet does not mean sales to not occur. They do, and do so on a regular basis. In fact just about anything and everything is sold via the net. Companies already on tight advertising budgets realize you can not dominate the net like you can television or radio advertising. You might have sole sponsorship rights to a particular sports team or sports star i.e. Nike with Tiger Woods, but you can't dominate eight billion individual pages. So the smart companies decide that the cheapest way to increase there internet present is to appeal to the millions of internet webmasters, etc. How? By giving them a slice of the action, from about 5-10% for sales of traditional items e.g. flowers, hotel stays, etc up to 75% for informational products or services. Whilst one affiliate ad on one site may not generate a huge income, 1000 ads on 1000 sites can generate a small fortune. Although this sort of internet presence takes time to set up, once accomplished they keep on selling day after day with no further input from you necessary.

So if you have no affiliate partnerships get moving and get some now. If you have sites, maximize their income potential by adding affiliate banners and links. The most popular providers of affiliate links are clixGalore, clickbank and Commission Junction.

My favorite is clixGalore due to their easy to use interface and there provision of traditional product lines and worldwide coverage in most currencies if clixGalore and I strongly suggest you join them.

I also like clickbank and their advantage is that they affiliate programs tend to have a higher payout percentage.

Commission Junction is my least favorite because many of its programs are very selective about who they have as affiliate partners.