What is it? How Does it work?
The basic idea behind affiliate marketing is really quite simple. As a matter of fact, you have probably already witnessed a version of affiliate marketing in your daily life, but didn’t notice. In affiliate marketing you basically act as a salesman/saleswoman for Brand “X” by promoting their products using your own website, blog, newsletter or other marketing tool. In this example, let’s refer to Brand “X” as Amazon. Amazon.com, the company, wants affiliate marketers – YOU,  to drive quality traffic to their website in order to increase their POTENTIAL sales volume. As an affiliate marketer for Amazon.com,  if you drive visitors to Amazon’s website and they become an Amazon customer, by purchasing an item via your affiliate link, they credit your affiliate account with a commission – MONEY!

Affiliate Marketing Scenario:
Let’s say that you send visitors to Amazon.com from your affiliate link (aka: web link, hyperlink, affiliatelink) that is located on your website that focuses on iphone accessories. In this example, let’s say that you have a nice banner ad for iphone cases at the top of your website that has an affiliate link that goes to Amazon.com. If a visitor clicks that banner ad they will be sent to the product page for that item with your unique affiliate id recorded by Amazon. FYI(affiliate links can also be placed on blogs, newletters, forum signatures, classified ads, etc) At this point, it does not matter if the customer buys an iphone case or a DVD player, as long as they purchase something while they are at Amazon, having been sent there from your affiliate link, your affiliate account will be credited with a sale! Here are the three basic scenarios of affiliate marketing as they relate to our example:

• If the individual that landed on Amazon.com through your affiliate link DOES make a purchase while at Amazon, your affiliate account WILL receive a commission for that sale.
• If the individual that landed on Amazon.com through your affiliate link DOES NOT make a purchase, then, hopefully, a cookie with your unique affiliate id will reside on their internet browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.) so that if they decide to make a purchase LATER, your affiliate account WILL receive a commission for that sale.
• If the individual that landed on Amazon.com through your affiliate link NEVER makes a purchase, then you WILL NOT receive a commission.

This is a basic video example of how affiliate marketing works:

Talk with ya soon,
Preston

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