Affiliate Programs

What are they?

Affiliate programs allow you, me and others to sign up to promote good and services of the vendors and receieve commissions on sales. They are one of the most straightforward ways of making money online.

How does it work?

Affiliate programs online detect the refering website when a visitor reaches their online store. If a purchase occurs, the referring website account is credited. The tracking is usually done via special url that contains the affiliate's account id. After the visitor arrives to the vendor site, usually a cookie is set to associate this visitor with the particular affiliate, so that a future sale can be credited to the correct affiliate, even if no sale takes place immediately. The tracking cookie usually expiresin a month, or it can expire in a day, depending on the affiliate program. For example, nowadays Amazon's Affiliate program cookies expire in a day.

How to get started?

Most Affiliate programs provide relevant banners, product links for the affiliates to display. Some sophisticated programs may make product data available. These may be huge in volume and usually requires expert programing skills and provides utmost flexibility and content management opportunities for the affiliates. A beginner can get started by displaying ready to embed product links and get familiar with the products and services being offered and perhaps develop more involved strategies and software to integrate with the affiliate program into his/own own website.