How Affiliate Marketing Works - The Basics

There is a form of Internet marketing called affiliate marketing. But what is it? How does affiliate marketing work? This article will explain how affiliate marketing works.

People use the Internet all of the time to search for products, services and information. When people search for a product or a service, they often are looking for a solution to a problem. Sometimes informational searches are for a product review.

The role of an affiliate is to provide information, via a web page, to that searcher. It may be in the form of a product review, or it may be a pre-sell. A product review is an evaluation of a product. The affiliate presents the pros and cons of the item and a link to a merchant selling the product. This presents the visitor with the opportunity to purchase the product through the affiliate web page.

The other way an affiliate adds value is with a pre-sell page. A pre-sell page provides the visitor with more information about the product and how it can benefit the visitor. The pre-sell page will also have a link to purchase the product.

The links used on the above two pages are specially coded links that when clicked, bring the visitor to the merchant page and tells the merchant who sent them. The merchant keeps track of this link. If the visitor makes a purchase, then the merchant uses information from that link to pay a commission to the affiliate. It is actually a little more complicated than that because tracking cookies are used, but in essence that is what happens.

So, in a nutshell, this is how affiliate marketing works. A web surfer searches the Internet to solve some kind of problem. An affiliate marketer provides a web page which addresses the problem. If the problem is sufficiently addressed, the visitor clicks to a merchant page through a specially designed linked. If a sale is made on the merchant page, the merchant uses the information in the link to pay the affiliate commissions.

This article hopefully answered the question: How does affiliate marketing work? But, it really did not address how to do it, how to make it happen. The concept is simple, but doing it requires knowledge of building web pages, search engine optimization, finding merchants and learning how to target customers and get your web page in front of them. You can try learning it on your own. The alternative is to find a good training course.

If you are interested in learning more about how affiliate marketing works check out this online community. You can sign up for free and give it a test drive.