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We can define affiliate marketing process as the act of searching for products/services that are developed/produced/delivered by others and then marketing them in return for a commission or percentage of the sale value. The act of searching is normally referred to as looking for affiliate opportunities.

Affiliate marketing is an online marketing strategy in which a person who is technically called an affiliate is able to make money online by simply promoting other people's websites.

These websites are owned by people called merchants, the ones who technically operate the affiliate opportunity. The affiliate promotes these merchants' products/services/websites and whenever a sale is generated by the activity of this particular affiliate, the merchant pays the affiliate a commission, the amount of which has been decided on even before the transaction occurred.

Therefore, Affiliate marketing is a large business on the internet today that involves a partnership between a merchant and one or more affiliates, in which the affiliates advertise or promote the merchant's product/service free of charge until a customer is gained.

Merchants use different methods to pay their affiliates and each method has its pros and cons. The main methods are:

1-Check
2-Merchant self developed debit card
3-Payment Processors.

A payment processor is by far the method that is used by most merchants. Some of the most famous ones are Paypal, 2Checkout (2CO) and a new one that is rising very quickly is Alertpay. Each one of those processors comes with its own list of disadvantages, but in general they make life easy for the online business world.

The decision to become an affiliate and search for affiliate opportunities must be a conscious one. The main reason for any person who consciously decides to seek affiliate opportunities is the fact that not all home business entrepreneurs are experienced enough to produce their own product, so most of us 'would-be-entrepreneurs' become affiliates.

Since affiliate opportunities are all over the internet, a person who is new to the online business and wants to establish one, the temptation can be high to join almost any affiliate program they see in the hopes of making extra money.

It could be useful to note here that a person who is new to the online marketplace is usually called 'newbie.'

Given the amount of products and services that a newbie gets presented with, and since newbie have a burning desire to make money fast, it is easy to see how the online newbie can get lured into joining a lot of affiliate opportunities without knowing if they should join them or not.

Some of the major obstacles that face newbies when starting to establish their online home business are the following:

1-Knowing which industry they want to be in.
2-Knowing how to market online
3-Knowing how to budget their online business
4-Which affiliate opportunities to choose,
5-How to build a website including hosting and design.

For a newbie to succeed in promoting affiliate opportunities, the first thing they need to do is treat it as a real business and not a money scheme to earn quick money. A real business needs proper planning and with that you would have a good protection against empty promises that the online marketplace, especially within affiliate opportunities, is full of.