Up until now, most affiliate marketers have used text links and banner ads on their websites to promote their affiliate programs. Smart affiliates create pages where they pre-sell their customers before they create a link. But, no matter which method is used for linking, if the customer is interested, they eventually wind up on another site. This can hurt sales.

Now, you can keep your customer on your site and complete the affiliate sale with an emerging type of linking system called "Sell Direct". While there are very few affiliate programs that are using this new method, it will become more and more popular in the future.

Sell Direct linking allows you to quickly add a sales button or buy now link onto any sales page on your website. When someone clicks that button they will be taken to an order page that can include your header graphic, which means it looks like your order page. Your customer is not whisked away to another site. After the order has been processed, the purchaser will be automatically transferred to a page on your web site that contains a link for downloading.

In other words, a Sell Direct system is designed to make it look like all the action takes place at your end, while the company you are an affiliate for is doing all of the work in the background (charging credit cards, providing access to the files, recording your sale, etc).

A Sell Direct system requires you to create three web pages. All three of these pages are hosted on your existing hosting space.

1. A Sales Page This can be a page you already have, or it can be a page you have created especially to sell your affiliate product. The Sell Direct system provides you with a short script to insert into this page at the point where you want the Buy Now button to appear.

2. A Download Page This is the page that purchasers will be directed to after making a successful purchase. A Sell Direct system will provide you with a piece of script to insert into this page that will provide a link for the purchaser to download their new audio files.

3. A Failure Page This is the page that people are directed to if their purchase payment does not go through successfully.

A Sell Direct system allows you to have a professional sales process up and running in just a few minutes.

Right now, there are very few affiliate programs that employ Sell Direct links, but you will begin to see many more as the future of affiliate marketing continues to evolve. It may even become the quintessential linking system of this decade.