How does affiliate marketing work step-by-step?

What is affiliate marketing?

In simple terms, affiliate marketing is when you earn commissions for recommending products/services to readers (or people you know). This is done by joining affiliate programs, where you get unique links (tagged with your personal ID) that track whenever your links convert to a sale. If someone out there buys something through your link, it rains money. Or, well, usually a small percentage of the sale, but it’s a start!

Affiliate marketing as a monetization stream is perfect for bloggers because we recommend things on a daily basis. It’s also a largely passive way to make money, which frees up your time to do other cool things, like travel and eat your weight in pie. Long story short: affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to monetize your blog, so you should read on to learn all about it!
Basic affiliate marketing vocabulary that you should know

Here are some words that you’ll encounter a lot with affiliate marketing. To avoid confusion, I’ve defined them briefly here:

The merchant: AKA the retailer, the brand. This is the person who is selling the thing that you’re promoting. E.g. if I’m promoting an Amazon wafflemaker, Amazon would be the merchant.

In other circumstances, you may be the merchant if you’re offering a product of some sort to sell and are hoping to get other people on board as affiliates… but that’s a conversation we’ll have another time.

The publisher: You, AKA “the affiliate”. You’re the one doing the marketing by promoting merchant goods to your readers (the customers) in hopes that they’ll make a purchase from your link.

Here is a video that I found that will explain the basics of affiliate marketing and how it works Here is the video.