Supreme Affiliate Marketing Wizard 7 1.1 The Background of Affiliate Marketing As an ongoing way to create income opportunities, affiliate marketing has captured the imagination and attention of a number of entrepreneurs over the last decade. Here is some background on the development of affiliate marketing and how it continues to evolve today. At its core, affiliate marketing is all about getting attention for a good or service by utilizing online resources that are managed by partners or affiliates. The most simplistic of all these methods is allowing advertising to be displayed on a web site that is the domain of the affiliate. Typically, the advertisement will allow the prospective customer to click on and be redirected to a page or site where there is more information and the chance to order the good or service in question. In return for providing a doorway for that customer to discover the product of service, the affiliate is rewarded with compensation, usually via electronic transfer or check. The concept of affiliate marketing is a natural outgrowth of the online marketing that sprang up in the early years of widespread Internet use. At first, online marketing was more of a business to business approach, since companies were the first to jump on the Internet bandwagon. Putting up a web site and sending emails out to solicit business was a cost-effective way to gather new business clients. As Internet use began to spread into the home, a number of companies began to see that working with owners of personal web sites would be a great way to promote goods and services with very little in the way of investment in marketing resources. The trick was to make the idea enticing to individuals, so they would be interested in allowing companies to advertise through their web sites. Out of this need to come up with a strategy that would appeal to a large body of people, the basics of affiliate