Ten years ago Amazon launched what was to become the first hugely successful affiliate marketing scheme. And its runaway success was largely due to the simplicity of the idea.

If you referred a visitor to Amazon’s website from your website and that visitor then bought something from Amazon, then you would earn a commission on that sale.

How does Amazon know the customer came from you? Every link from you to Amazon contains a tracking code that identifies you to Amazon. And that’s true of every affiliate marketing scheme.

In essence it is pay for performance advertising - the advertiser, in this case Amazon, only pays you if someone actually buys something from them. But in the language of the internet it is called affiliate marketing.

Today, Amazon boasts over a million Associates (or affiliates) who have contributed greatly to the success of a company that now sells billions of dollars worth of book and other goods and services every year.

I’m one of those Associates and am paid every time someone buys something from Amazon after following a link from one of my websites. So I can log in to my account at Amazon Associates and see that yesterday, for example, I helped Amazon sell seven items and once they are shipped I will earn a commission for doing so.

The success of Amazon has resulted in a whole affiliate marketing industry being born where countless businesses - usually called merchants in affiliate-speak - pay webmasters a referral fee or commission in exchange for customers.

In the UK, the likes of Tesco, B&Q, Woolworth, Virgin and numerous other household names offer websites the opportunity to make extra money by becoming affiliates. And there are hundreds of smaller specialist companies looking to do the same. And I’m hoping that affiliate commissions will help me achieve my goal of creating a million pound business within a year.

Some companies run their own in-house affiliate schemes, but to make life a lot easier for affiliates, affiliate networks have been launched that give you access to various affiliate schemes, track any commissions due (alongside a raft of other useful statistics) and who collect and pay any money that is due to you.

Some of the networks that I have been working with recently include Commission Junction, Clix Galore (affiliate link), Affiliate Future (affiliate link), Tradedoubler (affiliate link), DGM and Affiliate Window. If you have a website, or are planning to launch one, you can be earning affiliate commissions literally within minutes simply by joining one or more of the above networks and placing banner ads on your pages from your chosen merchants.

Well it isn’t quite that simple as I quickly found out for myself. Placing the ads on a page is the easy bit. Getting visitors to click on them and then buy something is a different matter. But there is no doubting that there is money to be made if you do get it right and there are plenty of affiliates out there doing just that.

Take eBay.co.uk’s affiliate programme for example. lts top affiliates are earning more than £100,000 a month - or more than a million a year - in commissions! And you can guarantee they promote more than just eBay too.

A million a year. I wouldn’t say no to that. Which reminds me. Time to get back to rebuilding those websites.