Whats Affiliate Marketng and its History

I would like to introduce Affiliate Marketing or you may call it affiliate programs as an alternative source of income for adults

A merchant, also known as an advertiser or retailer, is a web site or company that sells a product or service online, accepts payments and fulfills orders.

Affiliates (also called publishers) place merchants’ ads, text links, or product links on their web sites, shopping engines, blogs, etc. or include them in e-mail campaigns and search listings in exchange for commissions on leads or sales.

Merchants acquire new customers and pay affiliates only when a sale or other qualifying action is completed. This is called CPA or performance-based marketing. It is very efficient.

This is a citation from the book "Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants" from Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip.com and which describes how affiliate marketing on the Internet came into being.

As the story goes, affiliate marketing all started at a cocktail party. Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon.com (www.amazon.com), was chatting with a party guest who wanted to sell books on her web site. This got Bezos thinking. Why not have the woman link her site to Amazon’s and receive a commission on the books that she sold? Soon after, Amazon introduced the "Amazon Associates Program". It was a simple idea. Amazon associates would place banner or text links on their site for individual books or link directly to the Amazon’s home page. When visitors clicked from the associate’s site through to Amazon.com and purchased a book, the associate received a commission. With that thought, Bezos created Amazon.com’s affiliate program in July 1996.

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Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website has became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline businesses. Total sales generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the UK alone and roughly estimates affiliates worldwide will earn $6.5 billion in bounty and commissions in 2006. This includes retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, 'Net marketing' education offers, subscription sites, and other lead generation, but it does not include contextual ad networks such as Google AdSense.

Currently the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling and retail sectors. The three sectors expected to experience the greatest growth are the mobile phone, finance and travel sectors.

My details on what is an affiliate Program can be found at wikipeda