What Is Affiliate Marketing?

What is Affiliate Marketing?  This is one of the many questions that may eat away at many people.  My task here is to make it as simple as possible for you to understand it and to see how you fit into the equation now and how we plan to make you a part of the in group of people that are earning money online doing this very simple and easy method.

First an Affiliate Marketer is someone that has a relationship with major corporations and has an agreement with them to promote some or all of their products and/or services.  This can be done in various ways. From them are:

• Adding ads to his website
• Publishing articles
• Writing post,
• Using text ads, banner ads 
• and many other methods.

When the Affiliate Marketer generates sales from his promotion of the company's products he is paid a commission for completed sales.

Now, what then is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a relationship between parties that are brought together to generate income and the purchase goods, services and the like. There are four primary parties: the Merchant, Network, Publisher and Customer(s).

1.  We have the Merchant, who is the owner of the products. services and website that they are doing business from/marketed from.
2. The Network, brokers the relationship between the Merchant and the Publisher.
3. The Publisher, establishes a relationship with the Merchant and agrees to promote their products, services and website to people that frequents his website.
4. Customer(s) are the people that frequent the website of the Publisher or someone making an inquiry via a search engine.  There they find ads, banners and other forms of advertisement that may interest them.  They click through to the Merchant's site and find the item(s) they like and purchase.

At the end of this deal the Merchant earns money from the sales generated from the Publisher's website and pays a commission to the Publisher for a job well done

So, in short, Affiliate Marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliates own marketing efforts.  The industry had four major player: the merchant, the network, the publisher and the customer.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing]