What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a web-based advertising channel in which advertisers (online merchants that sell products or services) pay commission to publishers (independent parties that promote the products or services of the merchants on their websites or emails) for every successful leads or sales generated for the advertisers’ website. Sometimes, the advertisers may reward results driven publishers with vouchers, coupons, physical items or even vacation trips on top of the commission paid.

How it works?
Advertisers will provide publishers an affiliate link. The affiliate link carries a cookie, which has assigned a commission, tracking code and life period. The commission here is a fixed amount per lead or a percentage of a resulting sale on the advertiser’s website. The tracking code is to identify the belonging of an affiliate link to the publisher when a web surfer clicks the affiliate link. The life period is defined as the length of time starting from a web surfer clicks through an affiliate link to the time when the affiliate link commission entitlement has ended. When a web surfer clicks through your affiliate link and takes an action (making a purchase or filling out a form) with the advertiser (or merchant) within the cookie’s life period, that action is tracked to you, and you receive a commission.

How to promote affiliate link?
Normally, publishers use marketing material such as banners, graphics, textual links or videos provided by the advertisers for various marketing actions. Those actions include but not limited to SEO (search engine optimization), paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertisement texts and graphics on their website.

Where to find an affiliate program?
There are many websites offer affiliate programs, such as ClickBank, Market Leverage, Commission Junction, and E-junkie just to name a few. Just sign up with them (the advertiser) to get your affiliate link. However, you must agree to the terms and conditions before signing up. So, please read the terms and conditions carefully.

Commission payment?
Different advertisers have different payment methods. The most popular payment method is through an online merchant account using paypal, cheque or wire transfer. You may find advertiser using others type of payment channel sometime.

You can learn more about what is affiliate marketing through a video prepared by an affiliate marketer Rosalind Garner. After all, watching a video is more fun than reading!