The Growing Strength Of Affiliate Marketing In The World

You've probably heard of affiliate marketing before, although maybe not by that name. It's also known as a partner, sponsor, or associate marketing. If you've never made use of affiliate marketing, but you have a business to run... well, now's the time to get cracking. You're missing out on a new breed of marketing that is changing the landscape of business forever.

In a general sense, these programs allow you to use any online advertising medium to share revenue with an affiliate merchant website, by receiving a portion of their income for delivering customers who result in sales, leads or traffic to the affiliate merchant website. The popularity of affiliate marketing is very well realized now than earlier. This is prominent among the reasons for the high visibility of affiliate marketing programs among the ever growing number of affiliate marketers on a daily basis.

Latest web technology has enabled the affiliate marketers to get their statistics and income figures the moment they make an affiliate sale. It is now possible to use companies like PayPal for payment and receipt processing.

This has highly curtailed the time that an affiliate marketer needs to wait for his payments to be collected from the merchants. Today, both the merchants and the affiliates can see clearly that affiliate marketing can work for both of them. The merchant sees affiliate marketing today as the chance to advertise their products at a lower cost. The affiliates, on the other hand, sees affiliate marketing as an easy way of earning profits online by doing what they like most, and that is by creating websites.

The perception of affiliate marketing has greatly increased over the years. As new members learn to employ the techniques of today?s technology they gain a new respect for the marketing that affiliate programs afford. No longer regarded as an inferior means to generate customers, the affiliate program is looked at as a positive system by both the merchant companies and the members.

So the question now is what type of affiliate marketing will work best for you? Are all affiliate marketing programs the same? Are the benefits the same? Or are there affiliate marketing programs that work better than the others?

There are actually a large variety of affiliate marketing methods, and the types will depend on how they are going to be classified. The macro level classification of affiliate marketing programs falls under three main categories: pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-play (PPP) and pay-per-performance (PPP)