A popular way for people to make extra money is through affiliate marketing.

The term essentially describes the business relationship between an advertiser and an affiliate in which the latter drives traffic to the advertiser’s website and gets paid, solely in case those users carry out an agreed action. Most of the time, the action agreed will be a sale. This method is referred to as ‘cost per action’ and is what differentiates affiliate marketing from other marketing channels.

Any company owning a website where users can perform some sort of transaction could be an advertiser. Most of the time, this transaction refers to an order or sale, when the advertiser has an e-commerce website but it can also refer to other actions like the completion of an order form, sign up to the newsletter, etc.

Any person or company who owns a website from which they can send traffic through links or banners to the advertiser’s website could be an affiliate. An affiliate can also be anyone who directs users to the advertiser’s website through pay per click campaigns.

An affiliate does this in order to receive a pre-agreed amount of money if the users he or she has directed to the website carry out the agreed action (usually a sale). So, anyone can be an affiliate from a price comparison website, to a content site, a forum or even a blog. There are some issues of crucial importance that you need to take into consideration before engaging in affiliate marketing.

First of all you need to find a profitable niche – a niche that you are knowledgeable about, a niche for which there is high demand in the e-commerce field.

Before getting a domain name, you need to make certain that your domain name contains your keyword. The benefit is it appears to help search engine ranking a great deal, despite no one knowing since the search engines keep their ranking protocols secret. However, the experience can teach you that. It is also highly recommended that you choose a short domain name as this is usually more memorable as the internet users are usually impatient. Furthermore, use words that are easy to spell.

Since you promote products, you need to opt for products that are fast to download and easy to navigate, products with good affiliate history. Just Google them and find out.

Additionally you need to check out what and how many payment methods they have so that they can be user-friendly. You also need to build your affiliate website that attracts both your readers and the advertisers.

Important factors of a well-established affiliate website are creative graphics, keeping your website up to date with the most recent e-commerce developments as well as optimising your website by identifying a large number of popular keywords related to your niche.

Keywords you should optimise include those that are frequently searched, that are used by more serious internet users i.e. people with a mind frame to buy online or searching for something specific, and do not have too much competition.

Affiliate marketing definitely works. You only need to give it time and invest some of your spare time creatively.

Dr Tsiotsi is a lawyer specialising in information technology and telecommunications laws.