Also known as referral programs, affiliate programs are normally commission based sales.

This is how they work… You’ll recommend a site to your visitors/subscribers and then pick up a percentage of any sale that those visitors/subscribers make. You’ll benefit from the commission and the merchant benefits from the sales, and also new buyers on their buyers list if they are clever enough collect the details of their buyers.

If you already have a website set up, you can run an affiliate program from it, or you can simply build a site to promote a particular product or service. As long as it brings in more cash than it takes to build or run it, then you’ll be fine.

With any marketing program, you’ll need to be careful when you select an affiliate program. The benefit of an affiliate program will give you another way to make money from your users. Instead of selling them a product, you simply send them to a partner then take a cut of the profits.

Last week on 1st December the FTC  (Federal Trade Commission) released its new guidelines for which Internet Marketers, Bloggers and Affiliate Marketers and all product owners and vendors must adhere to.

I’ve been researching this for the last few days so I can make sure that I’m in compliance, and also to gather info to make this blog post, so that my readers are aware of the changes too.

On my travels I came across a very good webinar recording, which was an interview between a top Internet Marketer, Jim Edwards and Assistant Deputy at The Federal Trade Commission, Mr. Rich Cleland.

You can listen and watch the entire recording here, there’s also a full transcript and MP3 version too, but you will have to sign-up to Jim’s list to get the transcript.

For those who haven’t got time to watch the whole recording (which is quite long) I’ve taken some notes on the parts that will concern us the most, and some of the notes are from other various sources.