As per Wiki, the term Affiliate marketing is defined as “Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. It is an application of crowd sourcing.

The Affiliate Marketing industry has four core players at its heart: the Merchant (also known informally as ‘Retailer’ or ‘Brand’), the Network, the Publisher (also known informally as ‘the Affiliate’) and the Customer. The market has grown sufficiently in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including Affiliate Management Agencies, Super-Affiliates and Specialized Third Parties vendors.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies.”

So who all are there for you to capitalize on this opportunity:

• Commission Junction – Premier network for affiliate marketing. Provides affiliates and merchants alike with optimal revenue sharing tools and experiences.
• Click Bank – Promote with a single page order form which is meant for digital product change. All downloadable affiliate products.
• LinkShare – Top affiliate network providing affiliates access to hundreds of merchants.
• Azoogle Ads – Commitment to a close and personable interaction with their publishers, high-paying leads, and fast payouts makes them one of leading affiliate networks.
• Amazon – Simple to use, wide range of products, oldest and most popular programs
• Affiliate Fuel – Serves as a middle man to bring publishers and advertisers together to promote products and services.
• LeadPile – Affiliate network that allows you to generate and sell trade leads to the highest bidder.
• AffiliateFuture – Another affiliate program that pays you for generating leads, sales and clicks.
• ThinkAction – Affiliate network that claims to have the top payouts and the possibility of earning over $100,000 dollars per month.
• CafePress – Earn affiliate commissions by selling your personally branded merchandise.

As per wiki, CPM is defined as “Cost per impression, often abbreviated to CPI or CPM for Cost per thousand impressions, is a phrase often used in online advertising and marketing related to web traffic. It is used for measuring the worth and cost of a specific e-marketing campaign. This technique is applied with web banners, text links, e-mail spam, and opt-in e-mail advertising, although opt-in e-mail advertising is more commonly charged on a cost per action (CPA) basis although sometimes CPM is used.

An online advertisement impression is a single appearance of an advertisement on a web page. Each time an advertisement loads onto a user’s screen, the ad server may count that loading as one impression. However, the ad server may be programmed to exclude from the count certain non qualifying activity such as a reload, internal user actions, and other events that the advertiser and ad serving company agreed to not count. For online advertising, the numbers of views can be a lot more precise. When a user requests a web page, the originating server creates a log entry. Also, a third party tracker can be placed in the web page to verify how many accesses that page had. There are other advertising pricing structures, which are generally referred to as Cost Per Action (CPA) :

• CPC – Cost per click Through
• CPL – Cost per lead (lead usually meaning a free registration)
• CPS – Cost per sale
• dCPM – Dynamic CPM”

CPM-based advertising may be more suited for your company if your desired keywords are very popular and expensive. Instead of paying $5 for a single click, you could but 1,000 ad impressions. This can add up over time. It might prove good to monetize your website or blog with CPM to make money online.

Although click-through ratios for CPM-based advertising are low, click-throughs aren’t everything. Even an unclicked (but viewed) ad can play an important role in promoting your company. A well-designed ad will catch a viewer’s eye and may promote brand recognition, even if the viewer doesn’t click.

Where to capitalize on this opportunity:

A website or blog generating 10000 page views daily displaying an advertising banner with a $5 CPM, therefore, will earn $50 daily. The CPM rate depends primarily on three factors

• Choice of network
• Position of advt.
• Size of advt.

There are many PPC network explained in previous post offers CPM advt also. One of them is Google Adsense also, however it entirely depend on advertiser and publisher does not have any control. Below are the list of popular CPM advertising networks:

• Casale Media
• Advertising.com
• Right Media
• Burst Media
• Value Click
• Clickbooth
• Tribal Fusion