Affiliate Marketing – Highly Cost Effective, Highly Efficient

The Internet has fast become an efficient and trusted way for companies to market and sell their product. One of the reasons for this has been the rise of “Affiliate Marketing” - which is when a website directs traffic to itself through various traffic generation techniques. Affiliate marketing either pays the affiliate through a pay-per-lead program (the affiliate receives money every time an lead comes to the merchant's website) or a pay-per-sale program (the affiliate receives commission every time a posted advert on their site generates an actual sale or subscription.) Generally, the pay-per-sale program is the tried and trusted form of affiliate marketing used.


Affiliate marketing began just four years after the world wide web was launched, originally popularized by well known companies such as Clickbank or Amazon.com. Google’s Adsense is also a very well known type of affiliate marketing, but is not really considered as true affiliate marketing as the adverts usually centers around the theme of the website they are displayed (known more as contextual advertising.) Google does not also directly sell a specific product, but generates money in other ways.

Affiliate marketing is highly cost-effective, and in effect costs both the advertiser and the affiliate nothing, while having the potential of bringing in a very large form of income for both parties. While pay per click (or cost-per-click) mentioned above can present a risk to the advertiser, the cost-per-sale (CPS) system has very little or no risk at all for both parties, and is therefore preferred.