An affiliate program is a internet marketing, which repays the affiliates for fetching traffic to the advertiser website or for subsequent dealings. An affiliate program is a program demonstrated to attract more visitors to a website, and to increase sales. An affiliate program is also known as associate program or affiliate marketing.

The affiliate marketing in simple words is a market thru affiliates and the affiliates attract additional consumers. The affiliate programs have a vastly spread affiliate marketing network on Internet today.

The affiliate programs allow affiliates to promote the merchant's website and products. The affiliates of a particular sales website helps to boost up the traffic to the web site and they get commission on every single sale. Thus the affiliate programs can double or triple the selling potential of a sales website.

Let's have a dramatic representation of an affiliate program to get it properly. Suppose, a guy John is a sales website owner and in an affiliate program John will allow the other people to place his referral links on their sites. The referral links will definitely be aimed for John's sales website. The people who place John's referral links on their websites are known as affiliates. Now if a visitor on affiliate's site clicks on a referral link, he will enter John's website and if the visitor entered to John's website thru the referral link buys a product on John's website, the affiliate will get a commission. Hence the affiliates will strive to drive maximum traffic to John's website to earn maximum commission, which will increase the sales on John's website. The affiliates do not get a commission unless a sale is made.

The different affiliate programs follow different ways of paying commissions to the affiliates. Some pay a percentage of sales resulting from affiliate's referral. Some pay a specific amount per sale, or pay per click. Some programs track sales from particular referrals and some others pay the on purchases made by a referral for a limited time only.

The affiliate programs are beneficial for both, the merchant's and their affiliates. They can increase the traffic on the merchant's sales websites and thus increase the selling potential of a sales website. The merchants pay commission only if a sale is made. The avidity of commission on sales make the affiliates do positive marketing for their merchant's sales website, which helps to generate traffic on merchant's website. The affiliate programs are beneficial even if the sales are not made. They gain popularity for the merchant's link and consequently help to get his website a higher ranking in the search engines. The high traffic and high ranking on search engines definitely increase the sales.

The affiliate programs are beneficial for the affiliates in the sense that they get commission on every sale. These programs give the affiliates a large opportunity to make money by selling products of other people without actually storing and delivering the products themselves.