Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. With the proliferation of goods and services now available on the Internet, advertisers look to individuals and companies to help sell their products by utilizing webmasters and others to spread the word.

This can be in the form of banner advertising on affiliate sites, text links, reviews written by affiliates, direct email etc. The advertisers compensate webmasters by paying them for displaying the ads, for "click throughs" sent to them, or, most commonly, a commission on sales resulting as a referral from their web site or email message. Here are a few tips for affiliate marketing.

There are many affiliate programs out there, but if you really want to become a wealthy marketer, join a reputable affiliate program and focus your marketing and promotion on a single affiliate product or service.

In most affiliate programs, you are offered a wide variety of banners to place on your site, but very few of them will be effective. If you can attain a click through rate of 2%, then you are doing very well. Generally speaking, graphically rich banners do not perform as successfully as their simpler counterparts. The main reason for this is download time. By the time the banner has loaded your visitor may already have scrolled down the page and missed it entirely. It is also important to try and stick to the theme of your site.

Many companies, but mostly agencies representing a number of advertisers, now give their affiliates the options of using pop up and pop under ads. Anyone who has ever surfed the web knows how annoying pop ups are. They're not very effective and are usually closed before they even have a chance to load. Go for pop-unders and preferably those that only display once per visit.

One of the most successful forms of advertising is text link ads. They are bandwidth friendly, don't take up a lot of space and can be easily implemented into most page layouts. Good text links ads offer some information as to why your visitor should investigate the offer.

A company should also supply you with very short text links which only state the product or company name. The reason for this is so that you can implement the links directly into the content of related articles and reviews.

With these simple tips it can help you improve your affiliate marketing, thus making you a wealthy marketer.