Affiliate marketing is a very hot topic on the web right now. Not surprising when you consider the fact that a vast majority of successful online entrepreneurs make their money from affiliate schemes and programs. Since the early days when Amazon was being set up and founder, Jeff Bezos was establishing affiliates as key marketing tools for any online enterprise, affiliates and affiliate marketing has come of age.

The amounts of income being made have clearly transformed affiliate marketing into a very serious business. There are more and more affiliates comfortably raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars every month.

The first important affiliate marketing secret to bear in mind is the reason why affiliate marketing remains the most effective way of marketing any online enterprise. It is all about the power of the referral. It is rather awkward when a website is trying to promote itself directly to prospects. Actually very different from the situation where somebody else refers the business to others, including people they do not know personally.

This works out superbly for several reasons. Firstly the affiliate as a consumer themselves is able to quickly identify the strong attractive points of the business that will best attract others like them.

The other little known affiliate marketing secret is that most of the top-earning affiliates have their own websites and blogs. Having their own websites gives these affiliates a tremendous edge over others. The sites are usually very closely related to the affiliate program that they are promoting. By having their own site, they are able to harvest the email addresses of the traffic to their sites.

Usually, most people you send to your affiliate site will not end up purchasing anything. However when you have their email addresses in your opt-in email list, you can continuously market to them and the affiliate will automatically end up with a much higher conversion rate from the traffic they generate as opposed to an affiliate without a website who just sends traffic to their affiliate website.

This is the affiliate marketing secret that makes a difference between affiliates struggling to pull in a good income and those comfortably making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Affiliate Marketing With Google Adword's:

One of the best kept secrets in today's affiliate marketing world is the pay per click advertising version with Google AdWords. Adwords allows advertisers to place small ads on websites or on Google.com search result pages. You probably noticed the little advertisements to the right on Google.com.

In Affiliate Marketing you are promoting 3rd party products and in return you earn a share of a sale generated from your marketing efforts. We all have seen those little Amazon.com banners on different websites. These would be a very simple form of affiliate marketing. More sophisticated versions are complete stores build around Amazon.com or based on data feeds from other vendors. In some cases the affiliate has to build his own website and store - in others there are white label website templates or pages available for the affiliate to work with. Only when it comes to the actual sale the customer is redirected to the 3rd party vendor who carries the actual product.

Not a new variant but a not very well-known version of affiliate marketing is the promotion of affiliate product links/websites via Google AdWords. The power of advertising on Google.com is combined with the affiliate link. The affiliate partner does not need a website anymore, he directly links the customer to the 3rd party. With Google AdWords very targeted marketing is possible and well-written ads equipped with the right keywords can bring in big bucks. All the affiliate has to do is to figure out which keywords are affordable to promote. And that's where secret to success is. Everyone can buy the expensive and obvious keywords to promote products but when it comes to affiliate success via PPC advertising (aka Google AdWords) the inexperienced marketing folks are being weeded out or are left with big holes in their pockets. Finding the right combination of keywords, target group, ad copy is the critical piece of the puzzle.

Overall - affiliate marketing via PPC on Google or via Overture (competitor of Google AdWords) can be very lucrative and quite a few people are making a living of it. It sounds easy to do but to break into this field a new affiliate needs a lot of luck, big bucks or patience and knowledge.