How to Sign Up for Affiliate Marketing Programs

Taking off from where The ABCs of Affiliate Marketing left off, we now turn our attention to how to join some of the major affiliate programs on the web.

To begin with, we should first understand that the internet is chock full of hundreds of possible affiliate marketing programs for you to join. What’s important however, is that you select the ones that are most appropriate for your situation and that you feel most comfortable with. Note: though every affiliate program out there will promise you good returns, only a few can actually live up to their word – so browse wisely!

Major Affiliate Programs

For example, if you run a website or blog about pets, then the ideal way for you to go is to

Frontier Marketing debuts on Wordpress!

Hello all,

Recently, we have decided to launch our new Frontier Marketing blog on Wordpress to take advantage of its unique features and community.

This will complete Frontier Freelancing by providing fresh and fantastic content dedicated exclusively to internet marketing.

Please visit our new blog and help spread the word. You will leave bored or without learning something new about internet marketing and freelancing, guaranteed!

Until next time, au revoir!

The ABCs of Affiliate Marketing

Sometime or another, we've all heard of affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, it is one of the core elements of internet marketing whereby affiliates representing companies are rewarded for bringing over visitors to said company's website. Also called cost per action/acquisition (CPA) marketing, it is one of the oldest forms of marketing extant on the web.

The four essential components or "players" of the system include: the merchant (the retailer/company that wants to sell products); the affiliate network (intermediates between the merchant and affiliate); the affiliate (or publisher); and the ultimate customer.

To advertise and promote the products of their merchants, affiliates use a variety of means ranging from organic search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) using Google's AdWords or Microsoft's AdCenter, email marketing, content marketing (including article marketing) and also offline, physical display advertising in the form of fliers, banners, etc.

Probing PayPal

Baby boomers and Luddites excused, who among us has not heard of PayPal - especially with the near saturation of e-commerce in many markets?

Before delving into the technicalities of PayPal, it's best if we understand a bit about the company's history.

PayPal's history begins with the inception of the internet financial services company X.com founded by Elon Musk among others around 2000. By March of that year, X.com acquired Confinity (founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin) and the rights to its PayPal system (the gateway was launched only in October 1999). The company renamed itself as PayPal on June 2001 to focus exclusively on internet transactions - particularly on the popular e-shopping portal eBay.

In February 2002, PayPal became the first tech company to go for an IPO after the 9/11 attacks. On 3 October 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for a brisk $1.5 billion - thereby consolidating eBay's hold of online payments and seamlessly integrated the preferred payment means into its shopping portal (as early as April 2000, over 1 million eBay users were already using PayPal for transactions).

Today, the gateway boasts an astounding 100 million active accounts with coverage in over 190 countries around the world. However, the availability of accounts, payment options, fees and other particulars varies from country to country. For that, do refer to their official policies: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/country-worldwide

For starters, PayPal is the internet's largest and most popular payment gateway. Payment gateways, or e-commerce payments systems, are essentially online portals that facilitate electronic transfers of money for online transactions. Gateways serve as alternatives to traditional payment methods like cheques, credit/debit cards and have even swallowed some of the pie away from internet and mobile banking.For companies like PayPal, they act as intermediaries between those who buy (whether individual consumers or businesses) and those who sell (individual or business). PayPal and other gateways (don't forget banks) use sophisticated encryption software involving "tokens" to facilitate money transfer.

Back from Sabbatical

After a month-long break, I feel it's high time to get back to blogging and start enlightening others (myself included).

So from today onward, I shall commit to once again writing about fresh and relevant internet marketing and freelance-related articles for your viewing pleasure!

Until then, bon voyage!