To get to the point we will have to explain what affiliate marketing is, in addition we will need to explain what referral marketing is. To start off with, you will learn about affiliate marketing. When you own a company or organization that needs to be promoted or marketed you can use people to refer other people to use your website, or offline business. This is a marketing strategy that have been proven, tried and tested, and it is an easy way of generating more daily sales. The thing with affiliate marketing is that when you make a sale through one of you affiliates you will need to pay that person a percentage of what you have made on the sale. The going rate for affiliates doing affiliate marketing nowadays is about 20 - 60 percent of the item price. Most of the time companies will start affiliates on a 20 percent commission and move them up when the sales starts picking up. An affiliate program is a must if you are looking to generate traffic for your site and heighten your daily sales.

Referral marketing, as apposed to affiliate marketing, is the cheapest method of sales and marketing and companies and organization the world over are adopting this priceless sales method. Many of these companies will admit that since they have adopted the referral marketing method their sales have gone up by more than 60 percent and is still growing. To describe referral marketing to you, it is safe to say that it is a way of using your current clients to generate a new database of clients for you and your company. To have a successful referral marketing plan you need lots of business cards and loyal clients you can hand you business cards out to. In turn you client will take your cards and hand them out to close friends and family, and for any successful referral they make they will get paid $20. You could even take this a bit further and motivate these people by offering $5 for every referral they make and an extra $20 for every referral you sign up. This way they will be more careful when referring people to your company. This method work best for sales and marketing, the reason being that people trust friends and family when it comes to business, so you will always be getting trusted leads.

There is only one difference between referral marketing and affiliate marketing that is that online affiliate marketers get paid on a commission basis for each person they refer. Whereas referral marketers get paid a set amount for every referral they make or every referral they bag and tag for your company. This is a slight difference and is considered this because when you adopt the referral marketing method of sales you can offer many thing other than money to the people you use for referrals, like shopping vouchers, discounts on a meal, prizes, or you could even go as far as turning it into a competition, which makes affiliate marketing a more developed version of referral marketing.