What is affiliate marketing?
Q: What is affiliate marketing?
A: Alright, this one's a little more specific than "What is Internet marketing?" which makes our job a little easier here. The basic premise behind affiliate marketing is that you are selling someone else's product for them and then making a commission off of the sale.
For example, many people will offer e-books or other information products through a service called ClickBank. You can sign up for ClickBank, get a link to promote one of their products, and then direct traffic to them from your own website through that link. If the user purchases the product after coming to the website through your link, you'll get a commission off of it.
Commissions differ from product to product. Some are as high as 90 percent of the item's sale cost, others are much lower than that. This is a situation where the competition between publishers works well to the advertiser's benefit, though, as the publishers bid amongst themselves with increasingly higher commission rates to get an army of affiliate marketers working on their behalf.
In addition to affiliate marketplaces such as ClickBank, many products offer their own affiliate programs. If you have a website about lawn mower repair, for example, you might be able to find a company that supplies parts for lawn mowers with an affiliate program. As with the example above, you link to their products off of your site, and if someone makes a purchase, you get a percentage of the sale.
Whether you're doing it through an affiliate marketplace or through a product's own affiliate program, though, affiliate marketing is all about selling someone else's stuff for them. It's a highly lucrative way of monetizing the Internet. It's also a quite effective means of marketing for the suppliers.