What Is Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is marketing products or services for other companies in exchange
for a commission. You are a virtual sales person of sorts. You don’t deal with
inventory, customer service, follow up, or anything like that. You simply sell.
When you successfully get a customer to the business and make a sale (or lead), you
get paid a commission.
As an example, let’s look at Zappos.com. Zappos is an online shoe retailer. Zappos
wants as many sales as possible and in order to do so, will pay you a commission if
you get someone to buy because of your advertisements. So they give you a special
“affiliate” link and when you have people go through your affiliate link and purchase
something on the zappos website, you automatically get paid a percentage of the
sale.
Now… think if you could find tens of thousands of people actively looking for shoes.
You could be placing your special affiliate link in front of them and be making money
24 hours per day.
This is just a simple example of what affiliate marketing is and how it’s done; there
is a bit more too it all, but all of it will be covered in this guide.