Affiliate programs are also known as associate programs, partner programs, reseller programs and sponsor programs.

Affiliate marketing provides incentives to outside entities or affiliates to market your products. It sets up a spiderweb style marketing network where the individual strands of promotion eventually all reach into the center where you, the merchant, sits. With the advent of the net, affiliate marketing has become more effective and easy than ever before. It now requires almost no effort to make use of affiliate marketing or become an affiliate yourself. Even the prospective customers barely have to do anything to be a useful and profitable part of the affiliate marketing system.

Tracking an affiliate member?s activities has become very easy for these companies to do. With today?s technology it is easy for companies to track statistics and keep up to the minute records on income generated via the affiliate?s site. Companies can now use reliable pay out systems such as Paypal which also allows both parties to keep receipts of all transactions.

With less time and effort required to put in for profit on all sides, there’s almost no reason to not use affiliate marketing if you have a company or product that needs customers. For affiliate, it’s easy money with practically no drawbacks involved. For the merchant, it’s cheap advertising at a trivial expense. Both sides profit, along with the customers who appreciate tasteful affiliate marketing over the more intrusive and obnoxious forms of marketing.

The perception of affiliate marketing has greatly increased over the years. As new members learn to employ the techniques of today?s technology they gain a new respect for the marketing that affiliate programs afford. No longer regarded as an inferior means to generate customers, the affiliate program is looked at as a positive system by both the merchant companies and the members.

How do you know what type of affiliate program will work best for you? Are all of these marketing programs the same or are there programs that operate better than others? Do they all offer the same advantages and benefits?

To whet your appetite, here’s a quick glimpse at some of the more popular kinds of affiliate marketing. Pay-Per-Click marketing allows you to pay affiliates for each click a visitor makes to travel from the affiliate to the merchant site. Other means of determining payment, such as when a visitor listens to an ad (called Per-Per-Play) or actually buys your product (known as Pay-Per-Performance), are also available. Choose what works best for you and you can be making money hand over fist in no time flat. Remember, every moment you spend not making the most of your company’s potential visibility is a moment where you just lost a customer. With how easy the net makes it nowadays, you have no excuses.

Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing expert and entrepreneur who has built up multiple 7 figure online business and consults to some of leading online brands including Amazon, BBC, AIG and many others.