what exactly is affiliate marketing?

[trudijane56]

I am completely new to this part of the internet world; I have read your articles on building a blog and while it is very straightforward, there is so much I don't know that is just a given to others. I basically need affiliate marketing 101...any helpful articles or posts that can explain to me exactly what it is, how it works, etc?

[Gary Barzel]

Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing venture between a website owner and an online merchant. The website owner places advertisements on the site to either help sell the merchant's products or to send potential customers to the merchant's website. This is done in exchange for a share of the profits. There are three ways to earn money through affiliate marketing. They are called pay per click, pay per sale and pay per lead.
Pay per click means every time a potential customer leaves the affiliate website by clicking on the link leading to the merchant's website, a certain amount of money is earned by the affiliate.
Pay per sale allows the affiliate to earn money every time a sale is made as a result of advertising on the affiliate's website.
Pay per lead is every time a potential client registers at the merchant's website as a result of the advertisement on the affiliate's account, a previously determined amount of money is earned by the affiliate.

[cccfree]

Basically it's selling other people's products for a cut of their profits.

Amazon.com has a popular affiliate marketing program (well it was popular until the government started taxing State tax Amazon affiliates) so let's say that you have camera blog and you want to find ways to make money with it. Basically you can post a link at the end of every camera article or review articel that goes to an Amazon page for "cameras" and if that visitor that went to Amazon from your site purchases a product you can make as much as 10%-20%.

Informational products are also very popular and some pay out 40%-50%, like ebooks on how loose weight or re-grow hair or something like that, can go for $30 and if you can get sale that originated from you you make 50% of that.