Affiliate

An affiliate is someone who promotes another company's product and earns a commission when their promotion leads to a sale. You do not own the product, handle payments, or provide support. Your job is to send interested people to the merchant and get paid a cut of whatever they buy.

Affiliate promotes product
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Visitor clicks tracking link
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Visitor buys from merchant
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Merchant pays affiliate a commission

The appeal is obvious: no product to build, no inventory, no customer service. The catch is that the hard part is not getting an affiliate link. Anyone can get a link in minutes. The hard part is consistently getting the right people to click it and buy, which means you still need traffic, trust, and a reason for someone to act.

Affiliates work across every channel: blogs, email lists, YouTube, social media, and paid ads. The channel changes, but the economics do not. You are paid for results, not effort, so a promotion that gets clicks but no sales earns nothing.

To understand the full model, read how affiliate marketing makes money. To see where affiliates actually find people to promote to, read where affiliate marketers get traffic.