Per wikipedia, here is a description of affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates generally use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and to some degree display advertising.
Affiliate marketing - using one site to drive traffic to another - is the stepchild of online marketing. While search engines, e-mail and RSS capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing, despite lineage that goes back almost to the beginning of online retailing, carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.[1]
Two affiliate networks I utilize are Linkshare and Share-A-Sale. They are both FREE to join.
