Most people entering internet marketing for the first time start off with affiliate marketing programs. These are programs whereby you promote products for others for a commission on the sales that your promotion leads to making money being online.

In fact, that is an aspect of affiliate marketing that many people misunderstand. Unlike salesmen working for their company on commission for each sale they make, you are not actually selling anything. Your job is to advertise and promote the products in any way you can, and there are many ways to do so. The ultimate result of your promotion is that the prospect is sent to the merchant's sales page that does the selling.

There are many ways in which you can promote the products for which you are an affiliate. The benefits of affiliate marketing programs include the automation of many of the procedures involved, so that once you have set a program up you have very little hands-on involvement. The prospects that visit your referring site read your promotional material that could be in the form of a review for example, and then click on to the merchant's site. You have nothing to do after that other than to be paid and become a wealthy marketer.

Some affiliate marketing programs also include an element of network marketing, whereby you can also get paid for recruiting others to the affiliate program. You can get paid a percentage of the sales price for the products that are sold as a result of the referrals of your recruits that also led to sales. That does not affect your recruits' commission at all: yours is in addition to that. In fact, where the network payment goes two levels deep, you also get paid for the sales of the referrals of the recruits that your recruits recruit (if you can make sense of all these recruits!).

Where the payment levels go a few deep, this is termed multi-level marketing (MLM). A good MLM program is where the majority of the wealth in the company comes from sales, generally of products belonging to the company. Some generate their wealth primarily through payments made by recruits as registration fees or payments for promotional items, but you avoid these. By far the best are programs such as Wealthy Marketer whereby the majority of the income is from the products.

The reason for this is that unless there is cash entering the program from sales rather than payments made by members of it, then eventually those members joining the program later must lose out, because everybody cannot profit without money coming in from external sources. Another aspect of such programs is that there should not be too many levels paying you. It might seem better for you the more levels that pay you, but ultimately that mean that there is less for those in the lower levels.

Programs such as 1up and 2up programs pay only up to three levels, similar to many regular affiliate payment arrangements where the merchant pays out to one or two levels. These are the types of program you should enter, not those that offer what seem to be marvelous promises but on checking closer could not possible be tenable to any other than those that get into the program at the beginning.

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