Book excerpt: Affiliate marketing programs has never been as popular before as it is today. Why? There can be a number of reasons. Today, both the merchants and the affiliates can see clearly that affiliate marketing can work for both of them. The merchant sees affiliate marketing today as the chance to advertise their products at a lower cost. The affiliates, on the other hand, sees affiliate marketing as an easy way of earning profits online by doing what they like most, and that is by creating websites. Just as the popularity of affiliate marketing has shifted into greater heights, so has the people's outlook about it changed. No longer is affiliate marketing considered today as an alternative method for the merchant to advertise his products, or as a source of additional income for the affiliates. For merchants and affiliates alike, affiliate marketing is now considered as a main source of profits and revenues. Instant Profits Guide On Affiliate Marketing Tips to Clickbank Success Venturing into the world of the Clickbank marketplace requires that we start from a fresh slate and not go in with any presumptions. The two presumptions that seem to slow people up the most is that Clickbank is for internet guru types who know every trick of the trade of internet technology and marketing to be successful. But Clickbank isn't a marketplace that requires that you have tremendous technical knowledge to use. The designers of Clickbank have made most of the functions you need to operate either as a merchant or as an affiliate in the system fairly easy to use. That is one of the keys to why Clickbank is so successful. So to smooth your entrance into using Clickbank, it pays to look at the inner workings of the gears of Clickbank to get a feel for what you should expect when you sign up and want to get going fast making money there. Like a lot of successful online markets, Clickbank doesn’t make anything and it doesn’t sell anything. The value Clickbank adds to the world of internet commerce is that it provides a "place" for vendors of digital products can place their goods for sale and for people skilled in marketing to take those products and sell them to a large internet community. Clickbank has cashed in on two basic principles which are (1) people who make things don’t like to do marketing and (2) people who love to do marketing don’t like to make things. By getting these two groups together, merchants, affiliates and Clickbank all take away a nice profit because each makes the other successful. Clickbank then at its core is a clearing house that works as a meeting gourd for merchants, affiliates and customers who can order the product, pay for it and download it or receive it by some other digital delivery system . Clickbank also offers real value to both merchants and affiliates because they handle all of the financial details and take a lot of the administrative work off of its members.