Affiliate Marketing Undressed

Affiliate marketing according to wikipedia, is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.
Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site.

The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer.

The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.

With affiliate marketing, the publisher or the affiliate takes up programs from the network which was provided by the merchant to promote and make money based on system including per lead, sale, click etc.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods.

Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC - Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Some of the best affiliate programs to chose from includes Clickbank, Amazon, Paydotcom, Plimus and payloadz.

Each affiliate marketing programs have their own policies and methodology. Every affiliate is therefore meant to read their terms to know when they are violating their policies. 

As affiliates, you must have a better way of generating and promoting your affiliate links as well as getting the right audience for your affiliate products.