Affiliates and Affiliate Marketing

An affiliate is someone who has a business relationship to a company, organization or group. For e-commerce purposes, an affiliate is someone who is compensated to promote a product or service.

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.

The Affiliate Marketing industry has four core players at its heart: the Merchant, the Network, the Publisher and the Consumer. (Source Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

As an affiliate your job is to promote a product or service to your "list", this enables product or service provider with the opportunity to reach people they would not normally have access to and to make additional sales. As an affiliate you are compensated based the sales you generate. Commissions can be as low as 5 pr 10% to as high as 100%. How can someone pay you 100% commission and still make money? Because they are using your list to build their own, and when they make another mailing, they keep the full profit. In addition, they can still make money when they sell an OTO (one time offer) or other product that is either an upsell or a downsell to the original offer. We will discuss this concept in more detail later when we cover marketing.

As an affiliate, you do not have to have your own product, or worry about technical support or any of the other things a product or service provider has to deal with. It is an easy and inexpensive way to get started making money on line.

Affiliate marketing is a cost effective way for a product or service provider to reach a large audience and build there list. One of the first companies to offer an affiliate program was Amazon. Many internet marketers as well as Fortune 500 companies use affiliate marketing.

Next time we will discuss Affiliate Marketing Programs and tell you what to look for and what to look out for.

The Major Hosting Companies

Here are some of the major hosting companies (but by no means all of them).

First and probably one of the best know is GoDaddy. Their 24/7 live tech support can't be beat and Dana Patrick has done for them what that duck did for Aflec. Well, they also had a little help from a few Super Bowl commercials. They also have a significant number of plans and website developement tools. No matter what your needs are they probably have a plan that is right for you.

But, if you want to be an "afflilate" then you must supply them with a significant amount of information and they will then decide if they want you as an affiliate or not. But the commission payout is generous and they pay up to $105.00.

The second major company is 1and1.com. They have frequent sales and discounts on their services and excellent 24/7 tech support. They advertise mainly in print, but they are also well known. They have a service package that is just right for any need. Becoming an affiliate is quick and easy. The downloadable manuels are excellent.

The third major company is Yahoo.  They have numerous options all easily available from their main page. Yahoo has a wide variety of web hosting packages also and some very useable website building tools. Yahoo also owns GeoCities where you can get a free website. 

All three companies offer domain registration, but only GoDaddy will let you register a domain for up to 10 years.  The search engines will take your website more seriously if your domain is registered for a long time. 

In our next post well will start our discussion of affilates and affilates programs. 

Web Hosting Companies and Services

In choosing a web hosting company, you generally get what you pay for. The cheaper companies (although they are not necessarily of lesser quality) will not give you all the bells and whistles that you may need, like telephone tech. support 24/7.

Fast Host and My Power Host are both feature rich and much cheaper than the more famous larger companies, but you pay a price for the cheap service. Unless you know how to use the features and services they provide, they are no bargain. ( Note I personally use My Power Host for one of my websites). Fast Host can get you started for as little as $2.95 per month. Below you will find the basic information on their hosting plans. When you go to this link http://www.fasthost.com/hosting.php you will be able to see all the services they provide.

General Features	Fast1	Fast2	Fast3	Fast4	Fast5
Data Transfer	10 GB/Mo	95 GB/Mo	125 GB/Mo	155 GB/Mo	195 GB/Mo
Disk Space	500 MB	7000 MB	9000 MB	11000 MB	15000 MB
Addon Domains	None	5	10	15	20
Price ($/Mo)	$2.95 Order Now	$6.95 Order Now	$9.95 Order Now	$14.95 Order Now	$24.95 Order Now

You will notice that their is no telephone tech support, and see what happens if you try to become an affiliate.

My Power Host provides the following shared hosting plans as of this writing:

Stop jumping around from host to host. We provide you with all the tools needed to securely and reliably host all of your websites. Our support team is here for you 24 hours a day - 7 days a week. This is exactly why we guarantee 100% Satisfaction!

Package Highlights	Personal Power	Corporate Power	Extreme Power
Disk Space	unlimited	unlimited	unlimited
Bandwidth Monthly	unmetered	unmetered	unmetered
Per Month	$6.50 mo.	$18.95 mo.	$24.95 mo.
Per Month (Paid Semi-annually)	$4.50 mo.	$14.95 mo.	$22.95 mo.
Per Month (Paid Annually)	$2.50 mo.	$12.95 mo.	$19.95 mo.
Reseller Account		Unlimited cPanel Accounts	Unlimited cPanel Accounts
Sell Reseller Accounts			40 Sub-Reseller Accounts

The link for more information is : http://www.mypowerhost.com/hosting/plan-features .

You will also notice that they are feature rich and very economical, but if you need telephone tech support, forget it. But I can tell you from personal experience that their tech support staff will respond to your e-mails fairly quick and they are highly knowledgeable. But neither of these companies is easy to use for a newbie.

In the next post, we will look at some other companies which are better for newbies and are also very good for experienced web developers.