Affiliate marketing can be in a number of forms such as banner advertising on affiliate sites, text links, and reviews written by affiliates, direct email and so forth. The advertisers compensate webmasters by paying them for displaying ads, or for click throughs sent to them, or (as is most common these days) a commission on sales resulting as a referral from their web site or email message.

Many website owners and businesses are swapping ads in place of paying upfront for advertising on other site. The only time money actually changes hands, is when you pay out a percentage for each time your link is clicked on, and other website owner pays you for when his links get hit on from your site. One hand washes other when it comes to affiliate marketing. The tricky part here is which program do you participate in. There are thousands of programs out there, all claiming to be ‘number one.’ Being a successful affiliate will require a bit of work. With nature of web and hundreds of new websites going live each day, competition becomes much more fierce, which means you will definitely have your work cut out for you. Understanding how affiliate marketing works and how much time will be required on your part would be a good place to start before you make any decisions before venturing out starting an affiliate business.

The question remains.

How do I make money and how do I use my website space to accommodate for affiliate marketing?

Lets be honest here, Google is certainly one of biggest players as far as search engines go. The results returned by Google are fairly accurate, and while we take them for granted we cannot forget about all days of work that must have gone into algorithms that sort wheat from chaf. As this must have cost them some serious money, it would have been unfair to expect Google to keep paid advertisers from their site and it was only a matter of time before paid advertising became an option.

Getting Balance Right

One of problems associated with adding paid for listings to search results is that you can't simply hide paid for links into results of a search term. In early days of cost per click searches it was often companies with deepest pockets that were guaranteed top spot for a term. The only thing such companies had to prove was that keyword was relevant to term, if of course advert had to be reviewed before going live.

Search engines that offer paid for and free listings should really differentiate between two types of link. I know that whenever I've used a traditional pay per click search engine top few paid for terms aren't always relevant to what I was looking for, so I like to know before I click on a link if it was paid for or not.

Paid for results are fine, so long as visitors are aware they are paid for. Any pay per click engine that clearly makes distinction between two keeps some of its credibility by declaring its interest in a particular link.

Google Adwords Select

I'll admit I wasn't surprised when I heard that Google was offering a new cost per click program (Adwords Select); it was only a matter of time. However, having read through way program works, I was pleasantly surprised. Google's approach to their pay per click program is way forward, not only does it filter out obvious spammers in real time, but it can cut needless costs to advertisers while maximizing their own revenue!

There is a $5 setup fee if you want to use Adwords Select program, and minimum charge for a click is 5 cents. While this can work out cheaper than normal Adwords program that is based on cost per number of impressions, it is still enough to keep some of much smaller web site owners out of game as it were.