Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate programs are an electronic form of network marketing. Affiliate programs operate on the Internet using special web sites that track sales and commissions for their affiliates.

Basically they work like this. Say you wanted to sell books on your web site. You could become an affiliate for Amazon.com the Internet book giant. They would then give you a special coded link that you could embed on your web site and promote books with. When anyone clicked on this special link and bought books from Amazon.com you would earn a commission.

The big differences between affiliate programs and network marketing:
	1)	Affiliate program commissions are only one or two levels, so you do not have the income potential that you do with network marketing. And because commissions are only 1 or 2 levels, there is no field leadership that has a financial incentive to help everyone in their downline.
	2)	For the most part affiliate programs are VERY impersonal. So you do not have the relationship building of network marketing, which creates long-term, large sales organizations.
	3)	Affiliate programs are geared towards Internet marketing only. This means people who do not spend a lot of time online will never be exposed to this type of marketing, because most times they are never advertised or promoted offline. And because of this you have to be very Internet savvy, to make any kind of decent money.

On the positive side, affiliate programs are known for creating web sites that do the selling and training for you, because there is NO personal interaction. This is a concept I call remote control selling. This is a MAJOR concept an Internet based network marketer will borrow from and modify.

Direct Marketing – Direct marketing is advertising that asks people to take action. It directs them to respond by requesting more information or to buy the product on the spot. Direct marketing can be done in magazines, radio, mail and the Internet as well.

An example of direct marketing is when you watch an infomercial on TV and they give you a phone number to call to place an order. The infomercial did the selling and then they give you the phone number so you can take action.

Typically direct marketing campaigns needs a minimum of 4x profit margin or higher in order to be successful. Many direct marketing campaigns lose money up front or breakeven, because they are designed to make the money on back end marketing - secondary sales after the first sale.

Straight direct marketing campaigns will not work for most network marketing products because there is not enough profit margins to be able to afford expensive advertising campaigns. There are some exceptions.

But MANY direct marketing techniques can be used in an online business building system for Internet Based Network Marketers.

Internet Marketing – Internet marketing is simply using the Internet instead of another medium such as TV or magazines to advertise.

The Internet is:
	1)	Highly Interactive (email, video conferencing, autoresponders, multi-media, etc)
	2)	Information intensive
	3)	The ultimate environment for creating sales systems, because of the controls you can build into web sites through design, copy, multi-media and programming.
	4)	Worldwide access
	5)	24 hours a day
	6)	Speed