Although very much still in its infancy stage in South Africa, affiliate marketing is certainly starting to take its foothold in the market place.

Started in the late 90s by e-commerce giant Amazon, affiliate marketing enables website owners and online publishers to participate in advertisers campaigns in return for a performance-based fee.

Affiliate marketing is in many ways the online model, for what the offline industry would call a commission only salesmen.

Affiliate marketing took the world by storm shortly after Amazon created systems for the concept, and today every known company on the Internet has an affiliate marketing programme or what is sometimes referred to as an associates programme.

South Africa is traditionally very slow to follow world trends in terms of technology, and this is one of the many reasons why affiliate marketing has been such a latecomer to the online advertising Arsenal of many local companies.

One of the challenges for any company running an affiliate marketing programme is that it takes an overwhelming amount of resources to manage affiliates, campaigns, and the associated financial transactions such as affiliate payment fulfillment.

Additionally affiliate’s find it an over whelming task participating in multiple affiliate programs, which involves individually managing payments from each advertiser and tracking the history and performance of each advertisers campaign separately .

And so to this challenge was born the concept of an affiliate network. An affiliate network is quite simply a platform that brings advertisers and affiliates together under one roof.

Advertisers get the benefit of dealing through a single system which manages the affiliate payments, campaign distribution, and the necessary tracking, not to mention providing them with an already qualified base of affiliates.

Affiliates on the other hand have the benefit of a central location which provides them with access to multiple campaigns, and a single location for managing all the payments from various advertisers as a single payment.

Recently several companies in South Africa have started their own affiliate programs, not to mention 3 independent affiliate networks that have been started to address the needs of advertisers and affiliates alike.

All indications are pointing to the fact that affiliate marketing is about to take its foothold in South Africa as online advertisers begin to realize the opportunity to leverage their campaigns through a network of affiliates, and individuals and small companies realize the financial opportunity that exists within affiliate marketing.

This is indeed a very exciting time for South Africa's online industry.