What is Affiliate Marketing?

Alan posted a comment today stating that “loads of people still think that the whole affiliate marketing is a big scam.” I was surprised to see this because I didn’t think that people really believed this. I thought it might be best to clarify for those people what Affiliate marketing is and why it’s not a scam.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular, easy and effective ways to make money on the Internet. The concept of affiliate marketing is pretty simple. A merchant with a product recruits “affiliates” to sell their products and the affiliates make a commission from the sale. These commissions are also normally pretty steep. They can be anywhere from 50% to 75% or higher. Not a bad deal. Most of these affiliate programs are also free and provide all the tools you need to sell the product. All an affiliate needs to do is find people to buy it.

Why do merchants sell their products through affiliates to make a small sale you might ask? The merchants are able to gain a lot of exposure for their product and have very little ad spend. All this work is done by the affiliate. It requires very little work on the merchant’s part.

So why would an affiliate want to take on all that work? There’s really not a lot of work involved. An affiliate doesn’t need their own product or website because the merchant provides this. There are many ways for an affiliate to market the product. A few examples are article marketing, blogging, ppc, and seo.

In a matter of only a few years, affiliate marketing has become one of the most cost effective ways to drive traffic to a merchant’s site. Since, in most cases, both the affiliate and the merchant profit from affiliate marketing, there is no reason to believe that affiliate marketing won’t be a dominant advertising method well into the future.