Affiliate marketing is a means of selling a product where the producer of the product shares part of the selling price with other parties who promote the product, but do not actually stock it or sell it directly. These parties, known as affiliates, simply advertise the product or promote it in exchange for a portion of the proceeds.

There are literally tens of thousands of products that one can promote as an affiliate. Amazon.com has an affiliate program, and you can promote virtually anything that's for sale at that site Similarly, online auction site eBay also has a program that pays people to advertise their site and their auctions. The most heavily promoted affiliate products tend to be information products, and those are the ones that are often advertised with the "get rich quick" hype that draws many novices into the world of online sales.

Profits can be significant selling information products, which more often than not are electronic books, or e-books. Commissions for affiliates can run as high as 75%, and many people who are new to online sales get excited at the prospect of such high commissions. Anyone considering promoting informational products should examine them carefully, however, in order to make sure that the product they are selling is genuinely helpful and informative to prospective buyers.

It seems that more than a few informational products sold by affiliates are books about how to make money through online marketing itself. As such, the sales pitches often boil down to this - "Buy my book about how to make money and then make money by selling my book!" The books typically have a brief chapter or two about how affiliate marketing works, with another chapter or two on Website building or promotion and contain just enough information to qualify as a "how to" book on marketing. The second half of the book usually contains nothing but information about how you can make money selling the book itself.

This self-propagating situation leads to new marketers trying to sell the books to other new marketers. It rarely works, and most of the time, the only person making money is the person who wrote the book, who can then use his or her experiences in a chapter for their next book on how to make money selling books.

There are informational products on the market that are actually useful, and would-be marketers would do well to spend some time to research the marketplace to find products to promote that have real value. Books that have really useful information are easier to sell, have fewer returns, and lead to happier sellers and customers. Before you jump in to selling informational products as an affiliate, take the time to make sure that the public can actually use the product that you are selling.