Affiliate means an associate or partner.
In affiliate marketing you work like a marketing associate of a company. That means you market someone’s product, service or website online to potential customers to help the seller generate more sales.
The primary question is Why affiliates? Aren't the companies capable enough to promote their own products? Yes, they may be capable but think of it like this: A particular company has their product. From their advertisements and marketing every day 100 people buy the product. Now they announce an offer that some percentage of the selling price will be given as commission to anyone who can generate a sale for them and it will be given for every sale they generate. 100 affiliates join the program. Each of them in turn generates 10 sales. So the total number of sale goes up to (100 + 10*100) = 1100 from only 100 without practically any work from their side!! And think of the affiliates. They each have earned some good commission for each of their 10 sales. Previously only the company was having an income that too quite low, but now, not only company has boosted up their income but also 100 other people have a source of income!! It is win-win situation and nobody looses anything.
Affiliate marketing does not set you any rule or norm for marketing. You can do it your way as long as it is ethical. Now another pertinent question is how do the company know that who is generating a particular sale? Whenever you join as an affiliate to a company you will be given an unique link which contains a unique id for you, embedded in the link. Whoever clicks on that link will be taken directly to the sales page of the company. If the visitor buys the product the commission will be automatically debited to the account of the person holding that particular id in the link which has brought the customer to the sales page. The companies all have link tracking methods using cookies or may be sophisticated server-side scripting. If you generate the sale then you and only you will be given commission. No one can stop it!!
The most beautiful thing about it is you don’t have to persuade any customer or talk to him to convince him to make sales. You simply write some noticeable and attention catching ad, place your affiliate link with it and put it in different places in the web(How you can do this is explained in the post How To Market?). If any person interested in your marketed product sees your ad, high chances are that he will click on your link. That’s it. Your job ends here. Now it is the company’s sales page that is going to do the trick. As they are much more experienced marketer their sales page will be much more convincing. And the moment the visitor buys the product – Bingo!! You have earned something. Just think how much did you really do? You have only selected the product to market, written a good advertisement and routed the potential customer towards his destination. As simple as that. You have earned online without going out in the sun, without much amount of work, without investment and you don’t even have a website!!
