Are you a webmaster in need of funds for your website?

Is your website your only income source? If you answered, "YES!", to one or both of these questions then you need to be both a Google Adsense publisher and a affiliate marketer.

With affiliate marketing, promotion and time is a necessary part of the equation.

You may not make income with affiliate marketing right away. Google Adsense can start earning you money the minute traffic begins to arrive at your website. So, why not combine both?

Affiliate Marketing Is Long-Term

With affiliate marketing, you are building long-term income on multiple products that visitors can see again and again as they visit your website. As they build trust and rapport by reading your quality content, they will get interested in the products offered.

As an affiliate marketer, you earn commissions on all products and services sold through your affiliate link, banner or ad on your website. Even online retailers can and do benefit by combining affiliate products via banners and links with the actual products they're selling.

Affiliate marketing is a relationship made between two websites – one merchant and your affiliate website – where you promote his products and you both earn money when customers buy through your link.

Compensation comes in many forms with affiliate programs. This depends on the webmaster, merchant, affiliate network being used and the like. These services translate in cash for the webmaster, sales and cash for the merchant and so on.

Common methods of compensation include pay-per-lead programs where the webmaster is paid for every lead sent to the merchant. The merchant then follows-up, forms a relationship with the prospective customer and makes or doesn't make a sale. The affiliate makes money per lead. After that, the affiliate is out of the equation.

Real estate lead sites are a good example of the pay-per-lead structure. If the real estate broker who paid the affiliate $5.00 for a lead, subsequently sells a house for $100,000 as a result, the affiliate makes no more money.

However, if the real estate firm pays the affiliate $5.00 for the lead and the prospect buys nothing, the affiliate keeps the money and the real estate firm takes the loss.

More common and widely used is the percentage of sale, per sale commission method. That is, if a person buys a product from a link of the affiliates, they get a commission for the sale. If the prospect clicks through and buys nothing, there is no commission.

This is used by places like Clickbank and PayDotCom which sells a lot of software and digital products.

If you add the pay-per-click Google Adsense and Yahoo publisher business model to the mix, you have money that is paid when visitors arrive at your site, look at the advertising which is usually mixed into the content of your site, and clicks on it.

Every click is worth an amount of money from $0.01 up to around $20.00. It is based on keywords and what the content is on your page.  This method is passive; it only requires the addition of some code to your site. After that, it works on its own presenting relevant advertising based on the page content.

Google Adsense and Yahoo Advertising

In search engine marketing, both of these giants offer advertising via websites to their advertisers. It is to the benefit of website owners in that each ad that is clicked on is money in their pocket. Through the Yahoo or Google distribution network, targeted traffic is bought by advertisers and businesses that immediately appear on your website.

If you have good traffic, the advertising which is designed to be what visitors are looking for appears. People will click on the advertising and you make money.

What does this all mean?

Profits and cash for your website. Think of your site as a storefront. You are allowing people, for a certain amount of money, to put up advertisements in your window. People walk buy, see the advertisements and come in to buy products. Affiliate marketing is promoting via your website for products and services that interests the traffic you attract.

Add to it Google Adsense, and you've got a second stream of income that will gain you profits and add another stream of income to your site. You can create a number of sites that are designed to provide quality content, affiliate products that are niche targeted and add Google Adsense or Yahoo for extra money.