What is affiliate marketing?

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when you promote other companies’ products. When someone buys through your affiliate link, you get a commission.

As an affiliate, you’re a salesperson for the company. You help to make a sale, the company rewards you.

 

The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you can do it at scale. A typical salesperson only sells products from one company. As an affiliate marketer, you can promote products from many different companies and earn commissions from all of them.

 

How does affiliate marketing work?

The merchant gives each affiliate a unique link so they can track who was responsible for a sale. The link will usually look something like this:

 

1 affiliate link 2

 

When someone clicks that link, a small file called a cookie gets stored on their device.

 

An affiliate cookie does two things:

 

It helps the merchant attribute the sale back to the right person;

It (usually) holds an expiration date, so you get paid even if the buyer delays their purchase.

Here’s an example of how this works.

 

Imagine that a reader visits your post about the best winter jackets. They click on one of your affiliate links, leading them to a product on Amazon.

 

But they realized they have to pick up their daughter from school. So they leave their house, pick up their daughter, have dinner, and then finally go back to Amazon where they find the product again.