Are you considering taking the plunge and exploring the world of affiliate marketing? If so, you should be considering the benefits of promoting products as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing is one of the most rewarding income producing opportunities available on the Internet today. Since it has become popular affiliate marketing has generated more Internet millionaires than all other forms of Internet income generators have combined!

Affiliate marketing is the promotion or sale of third party products to customers. In layman's terms it is the selling of goods or services that you don't produce to people in order to make a commission. When done correctly affiliate marketing is essentially a sales method used to create the most money with the least amount of work.

The affiliates sole job is to supply the parent company with orders to fill by any means necessary as defined under the parent companies regulations. This means that the affiliate doesn't physically handle any product being sold. They instead offer their services as salespersons for the parent company and their products. Not having to manage inventory reduces the workload of the affiliate and most common marketing strategies have systems that can be entirely automated so that they work with little or no outside interference; in the industry these systems are commonly referred to as money making machines given that they produce an income no matter what the affiliate is doing at a particular time.

Because of this high degree of automation once a particular product marketing strategy has been implemented and begins to produce returns the affiliate can easily duplicate the method for other products using parallel methods and resources to produce multiple money making machines. In the event that an affiliates parent company has several products for sale these multiple machines can produce multiple streams of income for the affiliate.

Legitimate affiliate opportunities come at no cost to the affiliate in relation to the parent company. The parent company makes its money from sales of its product; affiliates make a percentage of each sale that they generate. This means that the only costs an affiliate should incur are a direct result of the marketing of products to customers. Depending on a particular marketing strategy the overhead can be greatly reduced or even eliminated by utilizing free services such as Internet classified ads. Advertising costs including ad placement and a website from which to drive sales are typically the only costs incurred by affiliate marketers.

The taking of orders can work in a few different ways. Most commonly sales leads are directed to the parent company through a link identifying the affiliate as having generated the sale. This is by far the least complicated method for both affiliate and parent company as it reduces the possibility of losing an order and provides another avenue of automation to further reduce the work of the affiliate. A less popular but equally automated way to handle the taking of orders is for them to be taken by the affiliate and then the processing information is sent to the parent company for final shipping.