The Importance of Affiliate Marketing in Internet Business     Copyright © 2005 John Woon http://www.johnwoon.com For many years ever since we started manufacturing products for sale in the offline physical world, we had been having sales agents representing different manufacturers to help the latter to expand their markets. Their main focus had been to make the sale by getting the orders from the prospects and existing customers, which were then processed by the manufacturers or merchants. In the Internet online world today we have affiliates instead of agents. Affiliates are highly targeted pay-for-performance sales agents. There are also some forms of Internet advertising that rewards the affiliates for driving traffic to the advertiser i.e. the manufacturers or the affiliate program owners. The advertiser pays the affiliates to place a link on their website, and the affiliate sends traffic to the advertiser in return. In other words, it's about the affiliates receiving commissions for helping in making the sales. Affiliates are being considered as a complementary but very important sales channel although the merchants themselves continue to get their own direct traffic in making their own sales.

The affiliates do not have to suffer from the occasional sleepless nights worrying about the processing of orders, packing and shipping etc because this are being taken care of by the merchants who usually have an effective tracking system to determine which affiliates drive which orders to them starting with the so-called affiliate links. These are the links that the affiliates put on their websites, newsletters, ezines or emails. The most common affiliate link is embedded in the linking URL. For example, if you see a link like "http://www.abcmerchant.com/?xxxx=3456", you can be quite sure that the affiliate with the ID (identification) 3456 will receive money from ABC Merchant when someone places his order after clicking that link. ....... Click HERE to read the whole article.