Affiliate marketing is a referral based marketing scheme which involves the payment of commission to sales persons known as affiliates by the online business known as affiliate merchants for any sales lead generated by the affiliate. So affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing program between the affiliates and the affiliate merchants.

Amazon.com - the premier in affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing has given rise to many success stories and thousands of leading businesses have adopted this technique as a reliable means of promoting goods and services. Amazon.com is considered to be a pioneer in this regard and has thousands of affiliates in the current date. The affiliate program giving by amazon.com is lucrative the only problem being competing with thousands of affiliates.

Online affiliate resources
There are many good directories available online from where you can get information about the companies that offer affiliate programs. Some good directories are associateprograms.com, refer-it.com, 2-tier.com, clickslink.com and cj.com Sites such as affiliatetoolkit.com help publish affiliate programs online and help in announcement of the affiliate program by submitting the site to affiliate program directories. While others like affiliatewire.com provide news regarding latest developments in affiliate programs through free online ticklers for websites. Another reliable website that has information for both affiliate publishers as well as advertisers is cj.com better known as commission junction. This site provides resources; database and information related to affiliate marketing and is a reliable affiliate network service provider. Affiliate marketing is not a magical solution to earn money but an extremely strategically one. The right affiliate program with the right kind of planning would go a long way in ensuring success.

Affiliate marketing program tracking options
Planning to launch an affiliate marketing program? Then as you must be aware, the most important decision that a merchant company has to make before starting an affiliate program is to figure out what kind of tracking solutions to go for? Whether to go for an in-house tracking solution or rely on the services of an external affiliate network? Let us analyze these decisions below.

Options available to affiliate merchants

• Using third party affiliate network services
• Using third party software solution
• Building your own system

Analysis of affiliate program options

Using affiliate network
Affiliate networks are third party service providers who act as intermediaries between the affiliate merchant and his affiliates. They take care of all the process involved in an affiliate program right from recruiting affiliates to tracking sales leads, dispute settlement, paperwork, documentation and payments to affiliates. In addition using these services will give you instant access to hundreds of already existing affiliates in the databases on the network service provider.

Using Third Party Software
Third party software solutions are a good option and don't need you to pay transaction charges as in case of networks. Going for a third party software solution will also remove the set up cost and give you access to a wide variety of latest softwares. It's a good alternative for any one who wants to carry out an in-house affiliate program.

Building your own system
If investing huge amounts of money as a set up cost is not a problem you may go in for building and running your own system. This option involves purchasing and installing an affiliate tracking software in your server. Of course that's not all; you need to run and manage the software yourself, recruit affiliates on you own, take care of all the payments to affiliates, deal with disputes if any arises between you and you affiliates, manage databases and records. A good option in case you have the right resources and are bent upon having an in-house project.

No matter which option you plan to choose, it's always better to do a bit of homework by the virtue of finding out affiliate business goals, type of affiliates needed, resources available, spending capacity etc.