What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a revenue sharing venture between a website owner and an online merchant. The website owner will place advertisements on his websites to either help sell the merchant’s products or to send potential customers to the merchant’s website, all in exchange for a share of the profits.
There are three ways to earn money through affiliate marketing:
Pay Per Click – Every time a potential customer leaves the affiliate website by “clicking” on the link leading to the merchant’s website, a certain amount of money is deposited in the affiliate’s account. This amount can be pennies or dollars depending on the product and amount of the commission.
Pay Per Sale – Every time a sale is made as a result of advertising on the affiliate’s website, a percentage, or commission, is deposited into the affiliate’s account.
Pay Per Lead – Every time a potential client registers at the merchant’s website as a result of the advertisement on the affiliate’s account, a previously determined amount is deposited into the affiliate’s account.
For many website owners, this is a great way to earn some extra money without actually having to “do” anything. All it involves is placing an ad on the affiliate’s website. There’s no selling or promotion of any kind. The affiliate can just sit back and wait for the profits to roll in.
It’s also beneficial to the merchant. By placing affiliate marketing advertising on websites all over the Internet, he has free advertising and doesn’t need to do much selling on his own. The more websites a merchant is affiliated with, the more exposure his products get, and all he has to do is allow ads for his products to appear on someone else’s website.
While affiliate marketing has its benefits, there are also a few cons. For instance, the merchant has to share the profits with an outside party. If an affiliate uses unsavory means to bring customers to his website and sell the merchant’s products, the merchant will also have to contend with doing a little damage control on his reputation.
The affiliate has to do thorough research on the merchant before agreeing to affiliation. To not do so can mean ending up with a merchant who refuses to pay commission fees or packs up his business and moves on without informing any of his affiliates. This is rare, however, and most merchants and affiliates have a pleasant and profitable business arrangement.
It’s important to choose wisely. In some cases, an ad can be placed on an affiliate’s website for months before a potential customer “clicks” or purchases something. If the commission is only pennies, this can lead to a frustrating relationship. Both the affiliate and the merchant are well advised to ensure the relationship will be mutually beneficial.
Affiliate marketing is considered one of the best ways to earn money online. If this is an avenue you wish to pursue, you’d be well advised to research each merchant thoroughly. After that, there’s not much else to do except wait for the profits to roll in!

What is Google AdSense?

Google AdSense is an advertising program that was launched in the middle of 2003 by Google, the popular search engine. Google acts as an intermediary between a vast number of advertisers and an equally impressive number of website owners.

Advertisers sign up with Google and create text ads that they would like to be displayed. Google displays these ads on the results pages of searches that people conduct from Google.com. The Google AdSense program allows these advertisements to show up on pages all over the internet. To see some of the ads themselves, take a look at the sidebar on this page. The webmaster simply places a special code in their page and Google AdSense takes care of the rest. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the system is that robots (specialized computer programs that scan internet pages) analyzes pages that ads will be placed on to determine which ads are most relevant to the page's content.



The relevancy of ads placed by AdSense varies on all sorts of criteria, but most ads are usually very relevant to the page on which the ad is displayed. For example, the ads on this page should be related to the internet, advertising, and/or the Google AdSense program itself.

Advertisers pay Google a certain amount for each time one of their ads are clicked. Google keeps a portion of this payment and passes on the rest to the owner of the website itself. Page views of the advertisements are irrelevant in terms of generating revenue in the program - commissions are only generated when internet users actually click on the ads themselves.

Google AdSense checks are sent out on a monthly basis. Many webmasters wait in anticipation of their checks since AdSense provides them a simple way to recoup some of the losses associated with posting websites on the internet. In some cases, webmasters can even make a profit using Google AdSense.