Basically an affiliate market is you give other people the chance to sell your product and in return you give them so commision. It's as simple as that. To spread awareness and also business potential and they gain some benefit from you. A win-win situation.
Basically its marketing products on the internet.. You sign up with affiliate programs to do this. But here is where its gets tricky. You have to know some terminology. Things like seo, ppc, article marketing, how to build a website, backlinks, good content. So it is a very steep steep learning curve to begin with. I woudl learn as much as you can here and then find yourself a mentor who knows what he is doing..
It gets better because nowadays you don't have to do much work as an affiliate marketer. Some programs come with ready-to-use affiliate pages complete with hosting and you don't have to struggle with FTP since the files are ready to be uploaded with help of software that comes with your affiliate membership..
you pick a product become an affilliate(partner) and you get paid a portion of what the product is worth for promoting and selling the product.
Affiliate marketing is a way for a product producer to have many people market his product for part of the profits. As the affiliate you can approach marketing from several points. As a new marketer you would first decide on a product to represent. Then the options are quite varied. If you have a "list" you write an email convincing your list to go to the product's sales page, and expect some percentage of them to buy. If you have no list and use a gift incentive to build a list, it could be set up like a sales funnel that the thank you for signing up page asks them to consider the affiliate product in an ad on that page. There are many many other options, enough for several books. Hope this helps.
Wow! Some very misleading s%$^ on this thread! "What is affiliate marketing?" You got a few minutes buddy? Affiliate marketing is selling a product for a product owner in order to earn a commission. Affiliate marketing was started by Amazon in 1993 when they offered their first commission structure, the rest my friend.......Is history! Affiliate marketing is an approach that leverages marketer's promoting abilities, with the need of small companies with limited budgets to advertise their products. Let's say I just launched a tropical fish business in the middle of new mexico! I need to advertise but I have no clue how to. So I open an affiliate program where folks that know what they are doing will advertise my site for a commission! Worked great then and still works today!
You're not going to learn affiliate marketing in one go. You will get varying opinions. It's best to find one reliable source to learn affiliate marketing from, then follow what you learn. Remember that there is NOTHING without application. You may know how to make millions online, but you will NEVER have that money if you don't do anything.