In essence, the affiliate program idea is all about getting marketers to help in selling a merchant’s product or service. A marketer becomes an affiliate for a product or service vendor commonly referred to as affiliate merchant. Your intention as an affiliate is to use the tools provided by the affiliate merchant, and your own campaign, to market a merchant's product, products or services by placing their affiliate links on your site, blog or in the signature of your emails etc.

Between 5 – 75% commission is usually paid to an affiliate for any sale that develops from his effort. Some affiliate merchants will organize their own affiliate programs while most of them use the services of affiliate networks. The most popular affiliate networks are Commission Junction and Clickbank. Carefully choose your affiliate program, some pay very late while some of them don’t even pay at all

It is vital that you do not become an affiliate marketer to any merchant without fully understanding their terms and conditions. The rules may vary from merchant to merchant, and you may discover that a promotional routine allowed by one merchant may be barred by another. Some merchants disburse referral commission to affiliates for just sending them a visitor, while other merchants only pay decided commission for each sale to a customer that you refer.

In contrast, as product vendor you will do better to reach out to more people on the World Wide Web by setting up an affiliate program. Search on line for ‘point and click’ systems to aid you in setting up your affiliate program. These days, you don’t have to know programming to be able to set up your affiliate program; you can find some ‘point and click’ system to help you out

A symbiotic relationship exists between the merchant, the affiliate and, the customer who locates the merchant through the affiliate. For you, as a merchant, an affiliate program can widen your reach and customer base through a lot of affiliate marketers.

As an affiliate marketer you are afforded the opportunity to make money, promoting someone else’s products and services, without the job of product creation, inventory management and after sales services.

With the above, affiliate programs provide you with a simple platform for affiliate merchants, affiliate merchants and customers to benefit from each other in a very successful manner. But you must get to know affiliate marketing in order to become successful in that business.

In closing, as an affiliate merchant or both, profit from your online presence will be contingent on your knowledge of Affiliate marketing rules and promotional methods. I strongly advise that you use article marketing as the engine that turns your affiliate market.