An aspiring Affiliate Marketer is one who hopes to capitalize on the wave of online or offline selling by introducing others to services or products and getting paid when the other party enters some kind of contractual obligation to pay for the service or product.
The Affiliate Marketplace is the arena where Affiliate middlemen like clickbank.com and others have created sophisticated online programs that allow a newbie to simply signup, choose a product, then receive affiliate tracking codes that they then put on their sites.
In some instances the middleman pays the affiliate directly ( and takes a hefty chunk ) and in other cases the original owner of the service or product pays the affiliate generally once or twice a month on schedule.
ClickBank is one of the largest of the affiliate networks in the world, claiming in 2008 to have paid out over 1.2 billion in affiliate checks.
Amazon and Ebay are also quite large and even more reputable in the eyes of the public than ClickBank which promotes info products only.
Commission Junction, Linkshare and a dozen other groups are very strong in the middleman affiliate business too, so if you are starting out new, take the time to sign up with all the services mentioned so far.
Some Gotcha\’s. Many of the services have a minimum threshold before they send you funds. So, if your threshold is 100 USD and you have earned only 96 dollars, don\’t expect a check/cheque.
Where this threshold gets a little insidious however is when the middleman starts acting like a bank.
What do I mean by that?
You know how your bank likes to charge you insignificant fees of 2 and 4 and 10 dollars monthly for just having such and such an account open with them?
Well, in late 2008, Clickbank appeared to have changed their internal policies and if you had monies in your account below your threshold, ClickBank started to \”do the banking thing\” on your balance. So, a balance of 80 dollars that had not met certain criteria for payment could be reduced by 5 or 6 dollars monthly.
So, should this discourage you from signing up with Affiliate Networks?
Not, at all, they are a necessary, ahem, evil… you must ensure that your marketing efforts overcome the costs of doing business.
Good luck
