What is Affiliate Marketing?

Whenever I mention that I’m involved in affiliate marketing I get a ton of questions from people outside of the Internet marketing world. Questions like: What is it? How does it work? And my favorite, “You can make money from this?” So, chances are if you are new to the affiliate marketing game you probably have the same or similar questions.

Affiliate Marketing Defined

Affiliate marketing is defined by Wikipedia as a “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.” What this basically means is that you are “affiliated” with another business online and will be compensated for bringing them qualified visitors/buyers.

Affiliate marketing can be broken down into several parts:

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Here’s a real world example of how the parts above might work. Say you want to promote a weight loss product online because the New Year is approaching and a ton of people make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight.

First, you need to find a weight loss product or service to promote that has an affiliate program. Then you would get an affiliate link for that product/service and promote it using various Internet marketing techniques. If done properly your promotional efforts will bring visitors to the merchant’s web site via your affiliate links and if the visitors purchase something from the merchant’s site you’ll get compensated.

One of the best places to find affiliate programs is with affiliate networks. There a hundreds of affiliate networks out there like Commission Junction, Linkshare, etc., but for this example let’s use Clickbank.com.

Clickbank.com is the affiliate network that acts as an intermediary between merchants and publishers (affiliates). It allows merchants to list their products/services for publishers (affiliates) to promote. So, since we are looking to act as an affiliate (publisher) we’d search Clickbank for a merchant offering a weight loss product. One quick note here, you need to have an account with an affiliate network to promote their listings. This seems obvious, but I just want to make sure this is understood.

After a quick search within Clickbank‘s marketplace I see a list of various weight loss products. One of the most popular weight loss products on Clickbank has been the Fat Loss 4 Idiots product and we’ll use it for this example (listing seen below).

Each affiliate network has their own way of creating an affiliate link, but the gist is to create a link specific to your account so when you send a visitor to the merchant’s site and they purchase something you get credit for the sale. So, to create a Clickbank affiliate link you would select the “create Hoplink” link (shown above) and a new window will pop up where you would enter your account name in where it says “Account Nickname:” (shown below).

After entering your account name you’d click the “Create” button and the window will look something like this:

The encrypted link above is your affiliate link. (If you copied and pasted this link in the address field of your browser it would resolve to the merchant’s web site and you would see your account name at the end of the URL.)

Now, with your affiliate link in hand you need to figure out how to promote Fat Loss 4 Idiots online. One of the best ways to do this is to create a blog about weight loss and promote the blog using SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (pay per click). If everything goes right you’ll have visitors coming to your weight loss blog, clicking on your Fat Loss 4 Idiots affiliate links, buying the product, and you getting paid!

So, to recap… affiliate marketing is a form of Internet marketing where by a publisher (affiliate) promotes a merchant’s products or services in return for compensation. The best affiliate marketers have been known to make more than $100,000 per day! Hopefully you can be one of them some day!