If you have a blog, a company website, a fan site or just about any other presence on the Internet, you may be missing an opportunity to make money. If you don’t have a product or a service to sell yourself (or even if you do) Affiliate Marketing is a way for you, with just a little up front effort and no additional cost, to make additional dollars.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a relationship based marketing effort in which a company with a product or service to sell offers a cut of the sale to their affiliates. An affiliate is usually a website owner who meets the criteria of the business seeking the relationship, whether that be something as simple as placing a link on a web page or something more specific, such as generating over a thousand unique impressions per month by visitors to the affiliate’s site.

What’s in it for the business?

A universal truth of any business that is interested in making profit is the need to bring customers to wherever the products or services are kept, be that a traditional brick and mortar store, or an online version that accepts payment in everything from credit cards to Paypal. Regardless of what the business has to offer, if the potential consumers never hear about it, sales are not going to be record-breaking; they may not even be enough to pay the light bill. If a business owner wants to sell, he’s got to tell; a marketing budget is a mainstay in any business plan.

Considering that the costs of advertising in traditional media can rocket up into the millions (should there be a hankering for a Superbowl halftime spot,) business leaders are always on the lookout for efficient, effective and inexpensive options to get the word out.

By offering an affiliate program, they are not taking on any risk. They determine how much they are willing to pay, either a flat rate or a percentage of the sale, for every widget or gewgaw an affiliate sells for them, or, more accurately, for each sale that results in an affiliate driving a customer to their site.

By smart planning, business owners can offer a slice of the pie to their affiliate partners for less than they would have normally spent per unit on other forms of advertising. With the Internet culture being one of free-market, no-barrier to entry capitalism, there are no limit to the number of go-getters who will take them up on their offer, and help to increase their bottom line while hopefully lining their own pockets along the way.