Rather than just going on and on describing affiliate marketing, I have decided to use an actual example, please keep in mind that this is only one example and that there can be many variations. Our overview begins at the MySpace Page of Amanda Bird. Amanda has organized her MySpace Page in the form of a sales letter. On her page I counted four text links with the following anchor text “http://www.innercircleforwealth.com/” and one with anchor text which reads “InnerCircleForWealth”.

Affiliate links can come in all shapes and sizes. A Google AdSense ad could itself be an affiliate link, a web page could act as a sales letter for an affiliate product, as could a free blog or a hosted blog. Amanda’s page is an example of using a social networking site for the purpose of affiliate marketing. When you click on any of the five links mentioned above you are brought to the following URL: http://www.thousanddollarprofits.com/65586. Take note of the 65586 at the end of this URL. This number in this case seems to be used to track which affiliate sent a particular visitor to the site. The number 65586 in this case seems to identify Amanda Bird. 

Some affiliate links to certain affiliate programs will land you directly a sales letter for a particular product, others will send you to a name squeeze page which will ask you to input your name and email address for more information. Here we see an example of the second type of affiliate link landing page. A name squeeze page is simply a sales letter that that is designed to sell you on submitting your email address. If you follow the affiliate link from Amanda’s page and then view the opt-in box towards the bottom of the page you will notice a “security code”. If you hit the refresh button on your browser you should notice that the “security code” seems to change with each refresh. I can think of two possible reasons for having such a “security code”.  The first would be to track which affiliate was responsible for signing a specific visitor up for the email list in case the visitor makes a purchase from the email list at some point in the future. This helps to determine which affiliate should be paid the commission for the sale. What some internet marketers do is to create separate parallel email lists for each affiliate they have. This way they have the option of sending each list the same set of emails and the ability to easily determine which affiliate is responsible for each sale. 

The second reason would be as a security measure to help prevent fraud. If you had a single step opt-in process for your email list then it might be possible for someone who did not like you to use some automated program to subscribe a list of emails to your email list. These of course would not likely be people who actually wanted to sign up for the list, but rather people whose email addresses were being used by a malicious third party in the hopes of causing trouble for the site owner. One of the things that is nice about this affiliate program is that if you visit the URL without any extension, http://www.thousanddollarprofits.com you are asked for “the username of the person who referred you”. Having such a policy shows a degree of loyalty and appreciation for one’s affiliates and is not the case with every marketer who creates affiliates marketing campain. 

The above example is only one example of affiliate marketing, hopefully this example has given you some ideas regarding affiliate marketing and can be a jump off point for further research on the subject.