What Is Affiliate Marketing & How Did It Originate

Simply put, affiliate marketing is an online marketing practice whereby a business rewards other people or businesses for bringing visitors or customers to them via the affiliate's own marketing efforts.

Nowadays the online world is awash with affiliate programs that involve essentially four players - the retailer or business selling the product, the affiliate network, the affiliate business itself and the customer. This arrangement has been so successful and affiliate marketing has made so many people wealthy so quickly that a whole auxiliary set up has evolved, with super affiliates and affiliate management agencies now appearing increasingly on the scene.

Despite this success, the benefits of affiliate marketing are not always exploited by online retailers to their fullest extent. They are always quick to use email marketing or search engine marketing but often overlook the simple concept of using one web site to drive traffic to another.

The whole concept of affiliate marketing started before the Internet – when we strip it down to its basic meaning we are talking about paying somebody a commission for referred business, which is certainly not a new idea and has been used in the business world since commerce began. When we transpose the concept onto the online arena we see that the original pioneers of this for e-commerce were flower and gift web sites, music sites and adult sites.

In 1996, Amazon was one of the first (now) major sites to actively use affiliate marketing, by paying commissions to sites that advertised their banner ad on their sites, encouraging people to click through and buy a book or CD. This model soon became the model that other sites followed for their own affiliate marketing programs and, 15 years later, it's still being used to some extent.

Since those days, as ecommerce has grown into a major player in worldwide business affairs, affiliate marketing's value has sky-rocketed. It was estimated that in 2006 affiliates worldwide earned US $6.5 Billion in commissions. The types of businesses that run affiliate marketing programs now encompass most segments – retail, gaming, travel, education, publishing, telecoms etc – but the ones that sit at the top of the pyramid are still generally the adult and gambling web sites, along with retailers and file-sharing sites.

Most people who get involved in affiliate marketing programs like Go Click Cash do so to make a new revenue stream initially. Some people end up running several programs and making their entire living from it, of course. The really successful ones can become super-affiliates who teach others how to make money from online affiliate marketing, passing on the secrets of their success via DVDs or online training programs. Many of these become well known "gurus" in the field; equally there are the programs that are hyped up and fall back down to earth with a bang, with people asking what all the fuss was about!

Payment methods for affiliate marketing are usually from cost per sale (CPS) or revenue-sharing. The other methods used are cost per action (CPA) or cost per click (CPC) - which used to be popular but which has faded due to fraud issues in the past.