I personally welcome you to this blog post, are you starting or planning on jumping into this amazing journey and venturing yourself to the internet income lifestyle, and you are a zero knowledge or even like the ones who still struggling to make it out there.
This affiliate marketing article will help you have some knowledge and ideas in how it works, so you can get started. Most of the people or shall say, 99.98% get started this way.
It’s like where everything begins from. The concept behind it is that you will be promoting products created by other people.
Yes, you don’t need to create your own, do this by signing up through an affiliate network.
Get paid a commission when people buy from your link. The way all this works it’s basically on revenue sharing, say you have a product or create your own, and you want to make more sales.
You will have to get people to promote your affiliate program and offering them some financial incentives.
As an affiliate marketer, you want to promote a product that has value and worth promoting to earn a commission from it, this is when you don’t have your own product.
Today let me dive in a little deeper about affiliate marketing, I have talked about a small portion of it only, but there is a lot more to it.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
My best definition of what affiliate marketing is, and is easily explained by someone well known by the internet industry and one I completely admire and follow, will be Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income. 
This also can be talked about it in a few different parties, many other individuals have their own way of explaining. However, I will talk about the 4 main parties I seem to have understood and also make it easy for you to better understanding…
Simplifying all comes down to the one who creates the product, the one who sells, and the affiliate marketer.
There is a common benefit to this process in all 4 parties, each party gets a share of the revenue, due to their collaboration.
Let’s have a look at all parts that easily help to define affiliate marketing.
- The product Creator Or Merchant
- The Affiliate Or The Publisher
- The Consumer Or The Buyer
- The Network ( essential needed. The intermediary, it works by connecting the dots)
Merchant:
The Product Creator: Either you call it the merchant, the seller, the brand, this is the one who creates the product.
This can be a small or big company or even a program that puts together well reputable software. It can be a single or even a group of people like the first Site Guide blog guys do and I love a blog post done by Anya Skrba that offers a course about how to start a blog.
The good thing about the affiliate marketing program is that anyone can easily be the product creator. You don’t even need to be actively involved on a daily basis. Just have a product to sell.
Affiliate:
The Affiliate: This is the party where you come in as a newbie, the one who just starting, you can easily start with zero out of pocket, by simply joining the affiliate network to get you ready to promote the link.
You are also called the advertiser, The Publisher. An affiliate marketing business it’s where everything happens. It can make you a few bucks in commissions every month or tens of millions.
As an affiliate, you can promote one or multiple affiliate products, by having a unique method to attract potential customers and potentially getting a sale.
Consumer:
The consumer: The buyer or a customer, this one reason products are created, the one who pays and makes the business moving. If there is no sell, there won’t be any commissions and there won’t be revenue to be shared.
Affiliates will promote to whatever method they can, this can be on the social network, solo ads, and more. There are a lot of methods of presenting the products to consumers.
The consumer will not pay you directly, they will pay to the affiliate network and then they will share the commissions to the product creator and to an affiliate.
But it can happen that the product creator is not part of any network, so in this case, he/she will pay you directly when a consumer buys through your link as the affiliate.
Network:
The Network: This part, to my understanding needs to be talked about it, as opposed to many other affiliates they do exclude and refrain from talking about, as to me, it plays a huge part in affiliate marketing.
Most of the time the network, it’s a part that connects almost all the dots, they play a huge role as they act as an intermediary.
It connects the affiliate, the consumer, and the product creator.
To me, both an affiliate and the product creator needs an affiliate network to be able to do business.
The product creator needs to get affiliates and a network that will help share the commissions accordantly and more.
The affiliate needs the network so he can find ready-made products to promote and get paid. Let’s pick ClickBank as an example of a network.
By the way well known and very good one. 
Amazon Affiliate Marketing Program.
When it comes to promoting consumer products, like household items, books, kitchenware, tools, clothing, and more.
I would recommend Amazon, this is by far the biggest affiliate network. Amazon associates will let you promote any item that is sold on the platform or network. 
If someone buys a product using your link, you will make a commission.
The good thing about it is that anyone can create an account to become an affiliate, your affiliate link will be generated and ready to go.
Great, looks easy, isn’t it? Well, it’s easy I can tell you that, signing up and getting started is really easy, you do not have to pay anything to become an affiliate.
Staying focus and taking action is where most of the affiliates find it hard and they just quit. Summary My point of view and assuming you are a very new person to all of this or you have a bit of knowledge already.
You definitely don’t want to start as the product creator, unless you have lots of money and you may ask someone to create a product for you.
But yet you will have to learn more about how the affiliate market works before your adventure into it.
My personal advice I would recommend you to take a route opted to almost everyone starting. The affiliate option, it’s the easier path and the only thing you will need to work will be on providing.
You will need to send enough traffic to your affiliate link and start getting some commissions as soon as today, tomorrow.
Just you know sometimes the sales don’t come that easy. It will all depend on where and how much traffic you are getting.
So my dear reader I do hope this helps, would love to hear from you.
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