Online affiliate marketing is a relationship that allows merchants and advertisers to work together to make profit.
The merchant offers a product or service, and the advertising affiliate uses their websites and Blogs to refer customers to the merchant.
Usually this is done through a link on the affiliates website that directs the potential customer to the merchants website.
The online affiliate's job is to simply drive traffic to the merchant's website.
The more traffic that they refer, the larger the chance that one of those potential customers will buy something from the merchant, giving them a commission.
The links the affiliate uses on their site could be a simple text link, a banner or an image link.
Recently, small videos or moving graphics are used as a link as well which have been shown to be very effective.
The affiliate can choose to use any and all of these methods to drive traffic to the merchant's site.
All the links are embedded with the same affiliate-tracking link.
The best part of affiliate marketing is that once the website, content and affiliate links are in place, your site will make money whether you are watching TV, cooking dinner, or even sleeping.
This is what is referred as "Passive Income", or income that you do not have to be directly involved with.
Simple day-to-day maintenance and new content from time to time will continue to drive more and more traffic to the site.
With each potential visitor, there is the potential for money.
There are several ways to drive traffic to your website.
Researching these methods are probably the most beneficial things a publisher can initially do.
Once the traffic gets going, its very easy to use affiliate marketing to make a significant amount of passive income.