An online business doesn't get much easier than affiliate marketing; it is one of the best ways to make money on the internet. Basically affiliate marketing is a business where a merchant (someone who sells a product) pays the affiliate a set commission when the affiliate refers a visitor to the merchant's website and the visitor makes a purchase.



The affiliate sometimes referred to as an associate advertises the merchant's product or products and or services and when someone makes a purchase the affiliate gets paid in various different ways depending on what the merchant chooses. Of course the affiliate doesn't get paid if the visitor does not make a purchase.

However some merchants will pay an affiliate even if the affiliate refers someone who does not make a purchase. All the visitor has to do is become a lead for the merchant for the affiliate to get paid. A lead basically means that the visitor gave his or her contact information to the merchant so the merchant can contact them later, usually by email.

Affiliates have a huge earning potential; anywhere from less than a dollar to several thousands of dollars just for referring one product. Of course there are many instances where the affiliate can earn commissions on multiple or unlimited products if the merchant sells more than one.

Without a doubt the best part about affiliate marketing is that affiliates do not need to produce or sell their own products which means they do not need to handle any customer service issues which means they can spend more time on finding quality products and promoting those products.

In general an affiliate marketer will need to produce multiple websites in order to produce a comparable income of one website that actually sells a product. Many marketers have found this type of business model to be much more enjoyable than the traditional business model where you actually sell a product even though they usually need to produce multiple websites.

The biggest challenge for most affiliate marketers is getting traffic or visitors to their websites so that those visitors can click on their affiliate link and go to the merchant website and possibly purchase one or more products.

There are numerous free ways for affiliates to attract visitors to their websites but the two best are optimizing their websites for the search engines and using article marketing with quality article directories like this one to get visitors to their websites.