The concept of revenue sharing has existed for a long time, a long time before the online world. Nevertheless, the idea of affiliate marketing online has taken it to new levels, and become a staple type of advertising and bringing in business for several kinds of e-commerce.

Online merchants find internet marketing highly advantageous due to the fact that it presents little to no risk both for the merchant and also the ‘affiliate.’ The way it really works is the fact that affiliate earns a type of commission or a fixed amount on the basis of the wide range of sales the affiliate brings to the merchant, either through on-line links from the affiliate’s website – or through email, blogs, RSS feeds and several other kinds of online communication. Some merchants (no more than 1% of internet marketing) use a Pay-per-click (PPC) remuneration system, which simply means that the affiliate earns each time an internet searcher clicks on an advert on the site or email. However, due to fraudsters benefiting from this technique (creating ad-ware, sending spam, or useless indexing sites) this type of remuneration is certainly not preferred and becomes too risky for merchants to use.

Affiliate marketing online also bears zero cost regarding the merchant within the original set-up – this basically means, it costs nothing to place advertising banners on affiliate’s sites, and there is only a price if a lead or sale happens to be generated (that is advantageous for many.) Merchants also get to set the parameters and decide on the incentive schemes. Thus, it is a really inexpensive (but highly efficient way) to grow a small business