If you surf the Web regularly, you won't have to look to hard to come across the term "affiliate marketing." Affiliate marketing is the term used to describe retail sales where one party offers a product for sale while another party, or "affiliate", advertises the product. If the customer buys, both the affiliate and the retailer of the product make money.

Many of the products sold on the Web via affiliate marketing are books devoted to the topic of making money online. Many of these products promote affiliate marketing heavily, using such phrases as "the easiest money you will ever make" or "make money on autopilot." Advertisers often exaggerate extensively, suggesting that you can work mere minutes per day while taking in hundreds, or even thousands of dollars daily. There is certainly money to be made, but it's more work than it appears.

A few affiliate marketers do earn the kind of money they mention in their ads. Their claims of huge earnings are not necessarily false, but their suggestions that you can easily achieve the same results that they get are a bit far fetched. Many of the more established online marketers have been doing online sales for years. There is more to their years of experience than simply wisdom; many of them have mailing lists with tens or even hundreds of thousands of customers. When a new product becomes available, these people can type up a single e-mail sales pitch and have it delivered to 50,000 people or more within an hour. Everyone else has to try to sell the product by writing articles or by trying to attract paying customers to their Website.

Selling through one or more Websites is profitable, but it takes time to learn how to draw visitors to your site. After that, you have to learn how to create your site in such a way that visitors become persuaded to become buyers. As with any other business endeavor, there is a learning curve and discovering how to build an effective Website can take months of valuable time.

Anyone who is interested in affiliate marketing shouldn't be discouraged by the notion of hard work. In time, one can create a network of profitable Websites and a large mailing list of customers who are ready to buy. These things are achievable, but they take time and effort. In spite of the advertisements that litter the Web about "printing money", "autopilot profits" or being buried under an "avalanche of cash", most people who make money through affiliate marketing do it the old fashioned way - they work for it.