Make Extra Money with Affiliate Marketing Networks

By: Skip McGrath

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice where a business rewards affiliates for each sale that occurs as a result of the affiliate's marketing efforts.

The Affiliate Marketing industry has four core players:

• Merchant (That’s the company with something to sell)
• The Network (These are the affiliate networks like the ones in the table below)
• The Advertiser (that’s you --also known as ”the Affiliate”)
• Customer (The person who buys something)

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to a large degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and pay per click advertising such as Google AdWords. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner in their blog, on their website or in social network sites.

Affiliate marketing is a great way for small online sellers to make extra money. You don’t even need a website. You can promote affiliate advertisers with a blog, from social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook or to your readers if you have a newsletter. Of course if you do have a website and would like to make some extra money then these networks can work for you too.

Almost all affiliate networks work the same way. First you sign up to create an account. Once you are in the program, you log in and look for advertisers. Most systems allow you to select advertisers by category, while some others are specialized. For example, MarketHealth.com specializes in health and beauty products.

One problem with most networks is that you have to join several of them to find the right products to advertise or to find products in your category. One answer to this is to take a look at Affiliate Scout. Affiliate Scout lists thousands of affiliate advertisers by category. This way you can find the networks with the products you want, before joining them.

The Top 50 Affiliate Marketing Networks

Make Extra Money

Making extra money with Affiliate marketing is not a shotgun endeavor. You must specialize. Ideally you want to find advertisers who are related to the topic of your blog or website. The best advertising is that which is related to your content and focused on your readers. Affiliates offers for credit cards and mortgages tend to pay the highest commissions, but if you blog is about pet care and training; then those ads would be out of place, whereas ads for Petsmart would work very well.

If you would like to get some training on how to make money with affiliate marketing, check out http://www.affiliatetraining.com/x/affiliate-articles/. This is a site where you can get plenty of free articles and advice for earning extra money with affiliate marketing.