Now that you’ve started learning about Affiliate Marketing, you may have come across another term that’s a bit new to you: Affiliate Networks. So what are they?

In short, an affiliate network is a third party service, that allows you to sign up for, manage, and earn from many affiliate programs all at once. That’s a bit of a mouthful so I’ll break it down further.

Let’s say you want to earn money by promoting exercise equipment. So you start looking around the web to find good affiliate programs in this market. You quickly find there are hundreds of them.

Now if these were all independant affiliate programs, you’d have to sign up for each one individually. This means if you wanted to promote 25 different merchants who sell exercise equipment, you’d have to fill out 25 separate affiliate applications, manage 25 different website logins and passwords, and you’d receive 25 different checks once you started earning money.

To make matters worse, you’d have to deal with the individual restrictions with each one as well. So if each program required you to earn $50 before they sent your commission payments, it could take quite awhile to earn enough from each one to receive your checks.

And that’s the major appeal of affiliate networks. When you use a network, you sign up once. You have one application to fill out, and one login to manage. In most cases, you also receive just one combined payment as well. But you can sign up for hundreds of different merchant affiliate programs through the one affiliate network. Then even if you only earn $5 commission from each merchant, the total amount earned is combined for you into one payment.

Now an important note: Not all affiliate networks combine earnings from all of your affiliated merchants. Most of the big ones do though, and this is where you need to do your research before signing up. It’s much easier to get an affiliate marketing business off the ground when you can have all earnings combined together, so read the terms of service and make sure they do this before deciding to join.

© 2006, Kathy Burns-Millyard. Want to learn more about affiliate marketing now? Check out these excellent affiliate marketing resources at EasySideMoney.com