If you're a webmaster, web publisher, or web merchant, chances are you have already come across the concept of affiliate marketing.

As online joint venture partnerships, affiliate programs allows both content publishers and web merchants to maximize their online profits by working with each other.

Content publishers, including webmasters, ezine writers and forum owners, are able to focus their energies and resources on what they know best...creating great content to attract web visitors.

Affiliate merchants on the other hand, are able to focus their efforts on creating great products, receiving online payments, and getting their products to customers.

The success of affiliate marketing has resulted in an unfortunate problem:

Because they are so popular, there are now so many affiliate merchants fighting for affiliates that it has become hard for them to differentiate themselves from each other and to attract good affiliates.

Put another way, while affiliates can help merchants solve the problem of finding customers, merchants are now facing the problem of having to first find good affiliates!

This has given rise to some innovative merchants setting up affiliate programs that pay affiliate commissions to multiple tiers of affiliates, the most popular being 2 tier affiliate programs.

What this does is to create a unique opportunity for "Affiliate Recruiters" who join multi tier affiliate programs to serve a slightly different function.

These affiliate recruiters, often owners of websites, ezines, and forums that attract other webmasters, focus their energies recruiting other webmasters to sign up as their "sub-affiliates" and to sell the affiliate products.

As a result, when affiliate products are sold by their sub-affiliates, these affiliate recruiters will also get paid a referral commission.

Two important points to understand are:

1) The affiliate programs must be free to join...no "sign-up" fees, "set-up" costs, nor "product-testing" fees are involved...otherwise they become traditional multi level marketing programs, and run the risk of affiliates trying to make money by "pushing products" to other affiliates.

2) While these programs create a new role for "affiliate recruiters" who can make money by specializing in recruiting affiliates, the products will still have to actually be sold to real customers for the merchant, affiliate recruiter, and affiliate to make any money.

If you are currently an affiliate merchant having problems recruiting good affiliates, why not consider using a multi tier affiliate program and let "affiliate recruiters" do this work for you?

If you happen to run a webmaster related site, or happen to know many webmasters or successful affiliates, why not consider being an "affiliate recruiter" by recommending multi tier affiliate programs?