Affiliate Marketing | thecanadiangeek

Affiliate Marketing – How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing in Canada?

In our series of “online business ideas for Canadians“, today I’m going to discuss about affiliate marketing and how you can make money online in Canada using affiliate marketing programs.

In today’s online market place affiliate marketing is the foundation for most small online businesses.

What is affiliate marketing?

Here is the definition of Affiliate Marketing pulled from Wikipedia:

“Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.”

Affiliate marketing works well for small online business because it provides a flexible platform from which they can apply their own creativity and knowledge towards the marketing of an existing well know product. When the customer decided to make a purchase or enter in their contact information it is sent directly to the product supplier. The small online business owner doesn’t have to stock anything, ship anything, or process any credit cards. This eliminates the need for warehouse space, merchant accounts and other expensive start up costs while still enable the affiliate marketer to promote a wide variety of products and services for which he will be paid a commission.

A major online company that uses affiliate marketing to promote their products does not want to deal with the contract negotiations and tracking of thousands of small affiliates. To make their job easier most major online companies usually work with just a few affiliate networks. These affiliate networks are companies that specialize in tracking, contract negotiations, payment distributions and quality control. They are a middle man between the major online advertiser and the small online business doing affiliate marketing. The value an affiliate network creates for someone doing affiliate marketing is that they provide a one stop shop where they can access hundred of different online advertisers. The affiliate network also handles all the tracking and sales and pays the affiliate a single monthly payment for all their different sales.

A search for Affiliate Networks in Google will reveal a nearly endless list of affiliate networks. Not all networks are created equal with many of the smaller ones simply pulling the offers from other bigger networks and re brokering the offer out to their affiliates at a lower payout. Also the majority of networks are based in the United States which can create a little extra paperwork and some delays in receiving your payments. There is one fairly large affiliate network called Neverblue located in Victoria BC.

Before you sign up for an affiliate account you are going to have to do some thinking about what types of product or services you would like to promote and how you are going to promote them. Also before you sign up you are going to need a website. Don’t worry, setting up a website is easier and cheaper than you might think and does require any coding or complicated steps. Here is some information on how you can simply and easily create a website.

Also read: How to Create Your Own Website?

Once you have a website live and have some ideas about what you want to advertise and how you are going to do it you can sign up for an affiliate account by clicking on this banner.

Below is a list of some reputed affiliate networks: