Marketing is all about generating revenue and affiliate marketing isn’t any different. For those of you who don’t understand affiliate marketing, its actually quite simple. Its basically where a merchant or business has a independent salesforce. How do they accomplish that? They pay a commission on a sale, or a fee on an action.

Often referred to as CPA Marketing, or Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action. Each merchant pays per certain actions. And the Marketer often called a Publisher or Affiliate is paid every time someone completes one of those actions.

Now some of you reading this already know this, but for those of you who have never heard of this before. Make sure you think more about how this can affect your business.

If you are a publisher, you can make money off the traffic on your website.
If you are a merchant, you can get a large salesforce to drive sales to your products or services.

I will post a basic tutorial on setting up a program for both affiliates and merchants when I return from Boston. Until then…

My wife and I are car shopping today and she is looking for something that is a little tough to find. So we called a car dealership about 30 minute from our house and asked about their inventory. Now normally we would have checked online but we were out driving around and I figured it’d be easier to call than hop online on the iPhone. Big mistake. The salseman asked what we were looking for and proceeded to say they have six on the lot that fall in our range and that they’d be very aggressive on our trade. So we made the trip.

They had 2 on the lot, neither matched our criteria. Guess what. He wasted my time and lost our sale.

Lesson, it’s ok to not be able to deliver. Just say so. I’ll be more likely to think highly of you than to never plan on shopping with you for wasting my time.