Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. Compensation or commission may be made based on a certain value for each Impression (CPM), click (Pay per click), registrant or new customer (Pay per lead) or (Cost Per Acquisition / CPA), sale (usually a percentage, Pay per sale or revenue share), or any combination of them. So any revenue sharing between online merchants and online web masters stands for affiliate marketing.

The advertisers/merchants are typically referred to as affiliate merchants and the publishers/salespeople are referred to as affiliates.

Benefits of affiliate marketing include the potential for automating much of the advertising process (accepting and approving applications, generating unique sales links, tracking and reporting of results) and payment only for desired results (sales, registrations, clicks).

Paying only for performance shifts much of the advertising risk from the merchants to the affiliates, although merchants still assume some risk of fraud from partner sites.

Affiliate programs have contributed to the rise of many leading online companies. It is not uncommon to see industries where the major players have affiliate programs--often structured in a similar manner and making similar competitive changes over time.

Successful affiliate programs require a lot of maintenance and work. The number of affiliate programs just a few years back was much smaller than it is today. Having an affiliate program that is successful is not as easy anymore. The days when programs could generate considerable revenue for the merchant even if they were poorly managed is over. Today's managers need to be very much involved in the program or face early termination of their program.

The benefits for the affiliate are:

- He/She doesn't need to own, ship, refund etc, products or services.

- Affiliates will be provided with marketing tools and will benefit from services that would otherwise cost too much to afford.

- Affiliates will be able to learn a lot and use what they learn to further advance their career in the company.

If you want to work from home and make money online, then this is the best job in the world. Affiliate programs represent a partnership and if you've joined one you better make sure you make the most of what they can offer you.

Online or offline, if you want to earn cash you need to know how to promote products or services, how to organize advertising campaigns, where to look for the perfect customers and how to attract them to your shop. All this and more you can learn simply by joining an affiliate program. You can work from home in your own time. You can ask questions and you will have tons of guides and tutorials.

If you would want to have the same resources available to you, you would pay thousands of dollars for courses, which may or may not help you acquire useful skills. Not so with affiliate marketing. You get to eat the cake and keep it too! You will be able to make money online while you learn all you can. What can be better than being paid to learn something that will prove useful throughout your life?