Affiliate marketing seems to be the current business trend that doesn’t show signs of stopping. Essentially, affiliate marketing is when you advertise, recommend, or promote a product on your website that falls in line with your business service. Then, the service you’re promoting pays you each time you make a sale. Through this method, you are not selling your own services, but promoting businesses that you want to recommend.

Affiliate Marketing is: “a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays a commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals”.

For example, I am an affiliate marketer for Bluehost. Whenever you sign up for Bluehost, a web hosting platform that I use myself, I receive a commission from Bluehost. Affiliate marketing works best when there is a degree of trust. I only promote products and services that I would use myself, because I know that it’s important to maintain reputation and quality.

Affiliate marketing works because the service can “track” clicks through a special link. Using Bluehost as an example, there is a special landing page that you arrive to that shows you have come from East Coast Designs. Affiliate marketing enables you to promote the services you love, and would likely recommend anyways, and earn a % of the sale. These terms are different per affiliate program, but they tend to benefit all involved – buyer, you, and the service provider.

Affiliate marketing is about trust, and an engaging relationship between you, your customers, and the services you recommend.

If you’re going to use an affiliate service on your website or blog, you should let your users know. A good way to do this is in the footer, on page, or on a page declaring your affiliations. This is the best practice, because it lets everybody know that you receive compensation for your recommendations.

If you want to find affiliate programs to join, you can generally find out if the service you want to use has a program. For example, if you google “Amazon Affiliate Program”, you will find an extensive affiliate program. If you are looking for more specific affiliate programs you should search that business and then “Affiliate”. The number of affiliate programs are growing day by day.

Cj.com is a great resource to find affiliate programs, and they have a great article explaining What is Affiliate Marking?.