There are a lot of different aspects and methods of affiliate marketing that can be used by people to earn a little bit of extra cash or even earning enough to make a living.

To fully understand affiliate marketing you must understand that several parties are involved. You have the company who wishes to advertise their products or services and they are referred to as the “Merchant” and you have the person who advertises the products or services for them and they are known as the “Publishers”.

“OK… I got that I hear you cry”, so what is affiliate marketing?

Well Affiliate marketing simply put is the process of outsourcing your online marketing to hundreds of thousands of potential marketers/advertisers who will promote the Merchants goods and services in return for potential financial rewards.

For Merchants this is a potentially brilliant form of marketing as it allows the Merchant to advertise on a very large scale at no risk to advertising budget if they opt to choose to pay a percentage on each sale.

Likewise this type of advertising is great for affiliate marketers as it gives them products and services to advertise and promote which in turn will generate them an income that they would not have had available to them.

This is actually a very good deal for all parties involved if the campaign is setup and monitored properly but I will go into setting up and monitoring affiliate campaigns in a later article.