Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliates marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimisation (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC), email marketing and in some sense display advertising (AdSense). On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner, writing articles etc.

Payments to affiliates are determined differently, depending on the product or service being sold. 80% of payments are based on revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS), 19% use cost per action (CPA) and the remaining 1% are other methods, such as cost per click (CPC).

Types of affiliate websites:

Affiliate sites are often categorized by merchants (advertisers) and affiliate networks. There are no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorization. The following list is very generic but commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers.

• Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers offers (search arbitrage)
• Comparison shopping sites and directories
• Loyalty sites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back or charitable donations
• Coupon and rebate sites that focus on sales promotions
• Content and niche sites, including product review sites
• Personal websites (these type of sites were the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing, but are today almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate sites)
• Blogs and RSS feeds
• Email list affiliates (owners of large opt-in email list(s))
• Registration path or Co-Registration affiliates who include offers from other companies during a registration process on their own website.
• Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparison and other features based on information that frequently change and require ongoing updates.
• CPA networks are top tier affiliates that expose offers from advertiser they are affiliated with to their own network of affiliates (not to confuse with 2nd tier)l.

Affiliate programs directories are one way to find affiliate programs, another method is large affiliate networks that provide the platform for dozens or even hundreds of advertisers. The third option is to check the target website itself for a reference to their affiliate program. Websites, which offer an affiliate program often, have a link titled “affiliate program”, “affiliates”, “referral program” or “webmasters” somewhere on their website, usually in the footer or “About” section of the site.

Even if all those methods seem to indicate that a site does not have an affiliate program, it could still be the case that there exists a non-public affiliate program. The only way to find out for sure, is to contact the site owner directly and ask!